In a report by The Star, newly appointed JPJ Director-General Nadzri Siron said the department was willing to extend help if requested by Honda.

“I will take the matter up for discussion with the department’s engineering division,” he told The Star when contacted yesterday.

He said JPJ can help Honda obtain the particulars of owners, especially those owning secondhand cars, and alert them of the recall.

This could be similar to the safety recall database set up by New Zealand’s NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) to help car owners identify if their vehicles were on recall, he said.

“The affected car owners are advised to heed Honda’s recall advisory and send their cars in to get the airbags fixed.

“It is for their own safety and of other road users,” he said.

The Japanese carmaker issued a statement last week recalling another 147,894 cars for repair involving the Takata airbag inflators.

Since last year eight Honda models, namely the Accord, City, Civic, CR-V, Freed, Insight, Jazz and Odyssey, manufactured between 2003 and 2011, involving a total of 329,059 cars, have been recalled.

Three deaths have been attributed to defective Takata airbags as reported since 2014.

The latest was on Sunday when a housewife, involved in a minor collision, died due to injuries to her chest from an item protruding from the centre of the steering wheel.

In a media statement on Monday, Honda confirmed that the Takata single stage driver’s airbag inflator ruptured during the crash, adding that “no official cause of death has yet been determined.”