German carmaker Daimler recalls more than a million Mercedes vehicles worldwide over faulty airbags

Daimler AG is recalling more than 1 million Mercedes-Benz cars and sport utility vehicles worldwide to address potential unintended airbag deployments, the German carmaker said on Monday.

The safety recall covers 495,000 vehicles in the United States, 400,000 in Britain, 76,000 in Canada and a few hundred thousand in Germany, company officials said.

An electrostatic discharge, coupled with a broken clock spring and insufficient grounding of steering components, can lead to inadvertent deployment of the driver side front airbag in vehicles subject to the recall, the company said.

As part of the fix, it said dealers would add new grounding to the steering components.

A Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman in the United States said there had been “a handful of instances where drivers suffered minor abrasions or bruises” due to the airbag problem.