Recall: Nissan Has A Big Bad Air Bag Problem

While this one's a little off the beaten path of the stories we typically cover, we wanted to give our readers who might own an older Nissan vehicle a heads up about an expanded recall related to complaints about defective air bags. Nissan widened its net of recalled vehicles to include an additional 226,000 automobiles, which brings the total number of affected automobiles to 664,628 so far.

Straight to the point, Nissan has recalled its Infiniti I32 (2002-2003), Infiniti FX35 (2003), Infiniti FX45 (2003), Infiniti QX42 (2002-2003), Maxima (2002-2003), Pathfinder (2002-2003), and Sentra (2002-2004).

Nissan Sentra

The air bag issue that's affecting Nissan and other car makers has been a bit of a black eye on the global auto industry, resulting in millions of recalls from players like BMW, Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Mazda, and Toyota. As for Nissan, this is a safety precaution -- there haven't been any defective air bag incidents involving the company's vehicles that it's aware of.

Takata Corp, a supplier of car parts based in Tokyo, developed the air bag system that's at the center of this and other related recalls. Complaints have surfaced about the inflators rupturing, which could cause metal fragments to fling out of the system when the air bags are deployed in crashes.