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Takata airbag victim urges consumers to head to the dealership

A man who lost an eye in a low speed collision due to faulty Takata airbags is urging the owners of cars with recalled parts to take their vehicles into a dealership, before it's too late. The public service announcement comes from ConsumerWatch.com. In a video, the consumer rights website gives factual information about the recall, and adds a personal plea from Corey Burdick. The Florida man lost an eye due to shrapnel from an exploding Takata airbag. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Burdick was traveling just 15 mph in his Honda Civic when he collided with another car. There were no other injuries caused by the crash, except for the loss of Burdick's eye. He filed a lawsuit against Honda and Takata this year. "I lost my eye because of a defective airbag. Take your car in today so this doesn't happen to you," Burdick said. ConsumerWatch.com told Honda and Acura owners not to drive their vehicles until the faulty airbags were replaced. Good advice, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also recently advised owners of 2001-03 Hondas and Acuras to get their airbags replaced immediately. NHTSA says airbag inflators in those vehicles have up to a 50 percent chance of exploding in an accident. But replacing the airbags isn't as easy as simply going into the dealership. Many owners who take their cars in for replacement are finding out that new parts are in short supply as manufacturers grapple with the largest automotive recall in US history. Takata may not have enough replacements until 2019, CNN reported earlier this year. The problem is so pervasive that some brand new cars were found to be sitting on dealer lots with faulty airbags still in place months after the initial recall. Some cars have received replacements that were also faulty and now will require a second trip to the dealer. However, waiting is not an option for many owners. At least 13 people have been killed and over 100 injuries have been blamed on the airbags. Related Video: News Source: consumerwatch.com, Orlando Sentinel, CNN Government/Legal Recalls Acura Honda Driving Ownership Safety consumer airbag Takata airbag recall

Acura will sell its EVs exclusively online starting in 2024

Honda has big plans for the new year and electrification will play a huge part of that, the company's recently-promoted SVP of Sales, Mamadou Diallo, told reporters on Tuesday. Expect to see a lot more Honda and Acura hybrids on the road this year, ahead of a major EV push come 2024. Overall, Honda is officially aiming to move 1.2 million units in 2023, with Acura shooting for 160,000 units, a 20-25% increase over what they sold in 2022. And although the company managed to maintain a single-digit days' supply of vehicles throughout last year, it enters 2023 with a glut of cars and trucks and a 17-day supply. As such, dealers are going to be looking to move a lot of that inventory before this year's models start arriving so fingers crossed, we could potentially see some Tesla-level price cuts in the near future. "In 2023, we will see the strategies we've been talking about, including growing sales of light truck models, increasing volume of hybrid-electric models and the start of digital sales at Acura," Diallo said in a Wednesday press release. "All this leads toward our vision of 100-percent electrified sales by 2040 to fulfill our ultimately goal of zero emissions by 2050."  The ZDX and ZDX Type S will be Acura's first full-EV offerings and serve as the harbingers of the company's new, exclusively online EV sales strategy. Diallo didn't have much additional information regarding how the system would work — such as whether haggling was allowed or how individual vehicle prices would be set — but assured the assembled journalists, "as we get closer to [the ZDX debut], we certainly will be discussing this a little bit more with our dealer body and the press in general. For right now we're still finalizing all those details." Acura joins Ford, Volvo, GM and VW in shifting its electrified vehicle sales to the digital marketplace.  For its part, Honda is planning a significant increase in its hybrid vehicle production in 2023, starting with the newly-redesigned Accord and Accord Hybrid (they'll also be Honda's first with Google Built-In). The company "will continue to increase hybrid sales through core models as an important step in bridging customers to full electrified vehicles while reducing GHG emissions," the Wednesday release reads. Honda anticipates a solid half of this year's CR-V and Accord sales to be of the hybrid variety and its efforts bolstered in 2024 with the introduction of a new Civic hybrid.

2014 Acura MDX [w/video]

Refinement Rather Than Revolution
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the 2014 Acura MDX, let's pause for just a moment and talk about the current, still-sitting-at-dealerships 2013 model. It's a pretty good machine. Perhaps guilty only of falling to the backburners of our minds in recent years because, well, the old girl's not gotten any younger. But every time we drove this second-generation MDX, our thoughts were the same - good to drive, pleasant to sit in and a pretty decent value.
Acura's customers felt the same way, and so when it came time to design and engineer the third-generation MDX, the vehicle's formula wasn't shaken up at all. Despite the fact that it uses a brand-new platform and offers a host of upgrades, the key points addressed by the company's engineers were the specific requests of customers and shoppers in the segment - changes that amounted to nothing radical. After all, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.