DETROIT (Reuters) - Takata Corp <7312.T>, the Japanese air bag supplier at the center of a growing U.S. auto safety crisis, said on Tuesday that it is forming an independent quality assurance panel headed by former White House chief of staff and U.S. Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner.
The panel will audit and report on the company's manufacturing processes.
Takata also appointed two former U.S.
transportation secretaries, Rodney Slater and Norman Mineta, to serve as special counsels as the company struggles to get its arms fully around a series of recalls related to defective Takata air bags.
Chief Executive Shigehisa Takada, in a statement released Tuesday, said Takata has collected more than 20 terabytes of data in response to requests for information from U.S. safety regulators and is producing more than 360,000 pages of documents for regulators.
(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
