Japanese automotive manufacturers have issued a world-wide recall of nearly three million vehicles because of an airbag defect. It is feared that front-passenger airbag inflators may have been assembled with a faulty component that could cause them to rupture in the event of a crash, posing a risk of fire or injury.

Honda announced that it had recalled around 2,033,000 vehicles produced between August 2000 and December 2005 (including more than one million in North America and 668,000 in Japan).

Meanwhile, Mazda and Nissan said that they had recalled hundreds of thousands of vehicles (159,000 and 755,000 vehicles respectively) over the same problem, which was also responsible for earlier recalls by Toyota. The airbag was manufactured by the US subsidiary of Japan’s Takat Corp.