2002 Acura Tl

The 2002 Acura TL has 7 recalls, the most serious being a driver-side airbag inflator that can explode during deployment and send metal fragments into the cabin, posing a risk of serious injury or death to the driver or other occupants.

The airbag concern has been the subject of multiple recall filings, but the underlying hazard is the same: the driver frontal airbag inflator can rupture with enough force to scatter metal shards throughout the front of the vehicle. This is one of the most dangerous defects in the automotive industry and has caused fatalities in other vehicles with the same inflator type.

On the restraint side, front seat belt buckles were not manufactured correctly. In a crash, a buckle that does not hold properly means the seatbelt may fail to restrain the occupant, removing one of the most basic layers of crash protection. These two filings describe the same underlying buckle defect, one under US standards and one under Canadian standards.

The remaining two recalls both involve the driver-side power window on sedans equipped with the auto-up feature. The window control unit can malfunction in a few different ways: the window may stop responding to the switch entirely, it may move on its own without any input, or the auto-reverse function may stop working. That last failure is the most consequential, since auto-reverse is what prevents the window from continuing to close if it contacts an arm, hand, or a child's neck. Prior repair attempts did not fully resolve this issue, which is why more than one filing exists for the same power window problem.