- Stellantis is calling for 441,000 cars to pulled from roads after a fatality in France.
- The move comes after a woman died when her C3’s faulty Takata airbag exploded.
- Older Citroen C3 and DS3s with their original airbags are hit with a stop-drive recall.
More than 16 years after the first reported death attributed to a ruptured Takata airbag, the faulty components are still taking lives. And following the latest fatality Stellantis is demanding that thousands of cars are taken off the road immediately to prevent further tragedies.
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A stop-drive recall campaign affecting 441,000 Citroen C3 and DS3 cars across Europe has been announced to remove the risk posed by cars that have not yet had their airbags replaced.
Related: Feds Probe Nissan After Airbag Module Explodes Into Driver
The order affects models built between 2014 and 2019 that were excluded from an earlier stop-drive order focused only on cars built between 2008 and 2013. At the time, Stellantis didn’t believe newer cars posed as high a risk, and only warranted a standard recall response.
The Fatal Incident That Prompted the Recall
That belief was shattered after a driver in France was killed when the faulty Takata airbag in her 2014 Citroen C3 hatch exploded, sending metal shards into her face. The accident happened on June 11 in Reims, killing the 37-year-old woman and injuring her teenage passenger when their car scraped a motorway barrier, French news reports say.
After city prosecutors opened a manslaughter case then handed it to a team in Paris overseeing Takata investigations, the country’s Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot ordered all at-risk C3 and DS3 models be taken off the road, and now Stellantis has echoed the demand with its Europe-wide stop-drive recall.
Stellantis Under Fire for Slow Response
Despite Stellantis having already upgraded hundreds of thousands of airbags, Tabarot described Stellantis’ handling of the Takata affair as “unacceptable and scandalous,” claiming it had “not matched the scale of the risk,” according to comments published by RFI.
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The automaker has also come under fire in France for its confusing safety strategy, which initially only issued stop-drive orders to 2008-13 models in the south of the country because the airbags were more vulnerable in hot and humid climates – 17 people have been killed in France’s overseas territories since 2016. That order was extended to the rest of France in February 2025.
A Wider Takata Legacy
It’s not just Stellantis that’s been grappling with the fallout from Takata’s defective airbags. The faulty components were used by a number of other brands, including BMW, Honda, Toyota, and VW. The Takata scandal eventually led the company into bankruptcy in 2017, but the aftermath is still unfolding, with the risks lingering in millions of vehicles worldwide.
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