June 12, 2018—California local police, neighborhood volunteers and federal transportation officials launched an outreach campaign on Monday to target drivers in the area who have not yet taken their vehicles to dealerships to have the air bags replaced for free, reported Los Angeles Daily News.
The campaign follows the reports of three deaths across Southern California over the past five years from malfunctioning devices, according to the report.
“Three deaths are too many for something that can be fixed for free,” Elisa Avalos said in the report, a board member of the Pacoima Neighborhood Council.
In May, a report noted that there were still 57 million vehicles with open recalls. The report noted that Southern states like Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico and Alabama are some of the states with the highest open recall percentages. Chris Basso, public relations manager for Carfax, said it was no coincidence that those states also have the highest concentration of vehicles affected by the Takata air bag recall.
Over the next 12 weeks, volunteers will knock on doors in the neighborhoods of Sylmar, Pacoima and Sun Valley, where the highest concentration of older model Honda, Ford, Acura and Mazda vehicles are, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
There are still 2.5 million Takata-airbag equipped vehicles on the road in California, said Heidi King, a deputy administrator for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. More than 1 million of those vehicles are in southern California, according to the article.
