Honda Cars Philippines, Inc. (HCPI) announces a voluntary recall of vehicles subject for inspection of some 171 units of the Honda Pilot and Odyssey sold in the Philippines for the period of June 2012 to January 2013 that are due to potentially inappropriate installation of rivet in Driver’s Front Airbag.

Findings show that there are possibly some rivets which secure the driver’s front airbag cover and bracket that were inappropriately installed. As a result, the deployment characteristics of the affected airbags may change upon collision and driver protection performance may decrease.

The announcement is part of a US recall of these vehicles following a manufacturing report in the US involving potential inappropriate installation of driver airbag rivets of some 836,716 vehicles of Honda Pilot (Year models ’09 to ’13) and Odyssey (Year models’11 to ’13) manufactured in the USA.

No crashes or injuries have been reported related to this issue.

HCPI is carrying out a proactive market action through the conduct of a Voluntary Recall. This action is in accordance to Honda’s own standard even if there is no specific law in the Philippines that requires such an action. Honda still opts to do the recall as a matter of policy on worldwide customer satisfaction when it comes to quality of the product and safety of customers which are the top priorities.

Concerned customers and/or owners shall be notified through a phone notification by Honda dealers and Letters of Notice were sent starting January 19, 2013. Honda is announcing this recall to encourage owners of all these vehicles to take their units to an authorized dealer as soon as they receive notification of this recall from Honda.  To conduct the voluntary recall in an orderly manner, customers are requested to call their respective dealers for service appointment or call the Honda Hotline 1-800-1000-HONDA (46632) and (02) 857-7240 or email at customer_relations@hondaphil.com. They may also visit Honda Cars Philippines’ website www.hondaphil.com  for inquiries and details of scheduling as well as the list of frame numbers of the identified vehicles.

In the event that the owners have already sold their units, they shall be requested to inform the dealership immediately so as to inform the transferee of this recall campaign.

HCPI will inspect the driver’s front airbag of the said Honda models free of charge. Inspection of the units will take about 12 minutes. For those affected vehicles, replacement of parts will take about 18 minutes only. Inspection and/or eventual replacement will be carried out in all 28 authorized dealers and 3 service centers nationwide. Inspection of identified vehicles will start from January 21, 2013

Owners of Honda Jazz, City, Civic, Accord, CR-V and HR-V models sold and distributed by Honda Cars Philippines are not affected and thus have no reason to worry since the affected parts are of different source.