Own A Ford GT? Stop Driving It, Immediately

It’s been 11 years since the infamous Takata airbag recall first began, and it feels like pretty much every car in North America has been subject to it at some stage. Somehow, there are still people out there driving cars with faulty airbags – including first-generation Ford GT owners.

Ford has issued a do-not-drive order for 457,000 cars still yet to have recall work done, which also includes Ranger pick-ups produced from 2004 to 2006, S197 generation Mustangs and a handful of Lincolns on others. Time to park up that GT if you haven’t had the work done already.

Handily, Ford is offering customers the option of sending a mobile repair service out to owners – something we suspect many GT owners will take – or to tow cars to approved dealerships. Work will be completed free of charge, too.

It’s not just Ford issuing recent do-not-drive orders, either. Mazda has also issued a similar advisory for around 83,000 cars including the RX-8 and Mazdaspeed 6.

Lighthearted comments aside for a moment, it’s seriously worth getting the work done if you own an affected car that hasn’t had it already. In case you’re not familiar with the Takata recall, airbags produced by the manufacturer known as far back as 1998 have been found to be defective.

In the event of a crash, many airbags have been reported as effectively turning into shrapnel grenades – exploding on impact and scattering metal shards.

Various reports have suggested as many as 34 million vehicles globally are thought to have been fitted with faulty airbags, yet millions are believed to still have outstanding recall notices. As of 2022, 32 deaths have been directly attributed to failures of Takata airbags.

The recall scandal eventually led to Takata declaring bankruptcy in 2017, with the Japanese company defunct since 2018.