Colombia Warns 100,000 Cars Still Need an Airbag Recall

Colombia still has more than 100,000 vehicles affected by an airbag recall that owners need to address, the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC, Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio) warned this week. Colombia’s regulator explained that more than 2,000 active safety campaigns currently cover vehicles nationwide, and every one of these recalls, known locally as llamados a revisión, comes completely free of charge for owners regardless of how they acquired their car.

The Takata problem specifically has kept Colombia’s consumer protection authorities occupied for more than a decade, since the safety campaign began back in 2013 and the SIC has continued reaching out to owners year after year to verify whether their specific vehicle needs the fix.

As of August 2025, Colombia had already identified more than 115,000 vehicles with defective Takata airbags still on its roads, concentrated specifically among model years 2001 through 2018, and cumulative records at that point showed 155,666 total vehicles affected nationwide, with 49,251 of those already repaired. Colombia’s ongoing struggle to reach the remaining owners mirrors a global crisis that has already caused dozens of confirmed deaths and hundreds of injuries worldwide, making this one of the largest and longest-running automotive safety failures the industry has ever faced.

Why Colombia’s airbag recall has lasted a decade

Colombia’s tally of affected vehicles spans a wide range of manufacturers, with Mazda accounting for 67,987 affected units, followed by Toyota at 34,847, Nissan at 32,447, Honda at 8,361, Mitsubishi at 5,545, and Subaru at 3,631, alongside smaller counts for Jeep, BMW, Ford, Dodge, Audi, Fiat, and Chrysler. That spread across so many different brands reflects how widely automakers relied on Takata as a shared airbag supplier for years, which explains why this single component defect grew into a problem touching such a broad slice of Colombia’s vehicle fleet at once.

The underlying flaw sits inside the inflator itself: certain Takata units degrade after prolonged exposure to high humidity, and Colombia’s tropical and coastal climates create exactly the conditions that accelerate this kind of deterioration over time. When a car equipped with one of these defective inflators experiences a collision severe enough to trigger the airbag, the inflator can generate excessive internal pressure and rupture its casing, sending metal fragments directly into the passenger compartment.

That failure mode has already caused real harm well beyond Colombia’s borders: the United States’ National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has linked the defect to 28 confirmed deaths and more than 400 injuries domestically, while the worldwide death toll from Takata inflators now exceeds 35 across multiple countries, underscoring why authorities everywhere continue treating this specific recall with such urgency even years after it first began.

How Colombian drivers can check an airbag recall

Colombia’s regulator stressed repeatedly that not every Takata airbag carries this defect, since the flaw traces back to specific manufacturing batches installed in particular vehicles rather than affecting every unit the company ever produced, so owners genuinely need to verify their own car’s status individually. Colombians can request a free replacement regardless of their circumstances, whether they bought the vehicle secondhand, never held the original ownership, no longer carry an active warranty, or purchased the car years ago, since none of those factors disqualify an owner from the free repair.

Colombia’s recall process does not always require pulling a vehicle off the road entirely either, since many cases only involve swapping out the specific defective component before returning the car directly to its owner. To check whether a specific vehicle needs this repair, owners can consult the SIC’s Product Safety Portal, search directly through their vehicle brand’s official recall page, or contact an authorized dealer and provide the car’s basic information.

Having the vehicle identification number (VIN, a 17-character code that appears on the vehicle’s registration documents) ready speeds up this verification considerably, since dealers and the SIC’s own portal rely on that number to confirm whether a specific car falls within an active campaign. Any owner who confirms their vehicle needs the fix should contact an authorized dealer promptly to schedule the free repair, since Colombia’s decade-long effort to close this gap depends entirely on individual owners taking that final step.