Takata executives allegedly withheld test results from its defective airbag inflators and destroyed evidence as early as 2000, at least 13 years before the defects surfaced across multiple automakers, according to a new filings from a personal-injury lawsuit.

In a deposition as part of an ongoing suit in Florida and as cited by the New York Times, former Takata engineer Thomas Sheridan said that while he was investigating a series of failed airbag inflators in June 2000 which had burst apart from excessive pressure, a top executive ordered the parts be “discarded” and doctored the report. That executive, cited by Sheridan as former Takata vice president of engineering Al Bernat, was also named in November 2014 by two additional former Takata engineers, Michael Britton and Mark Lillie, who said he had destroyed test data confirming airbag ruptures in 2004. That test followed the first consumer report of a failed airbag inflator, which had exploded in a 2002 Honda Accord during a crash in Alabama. The 2000 report, which was written for Honda, instead reported the ruptures as “normal airbag deployments,” according to Sheridan. The statements align with those made by Honda in November 2015 when the company announced it would no longer use Takata airbags in its vehicles; the automaker said that it was “aware of evidence that suggests that Takata misrepresented and manipulated test data for certain airbag inflators.”
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