Jaguar Land Rover to Recall 40000 SUVs Over Air

More than 40,000 Land Rover sport utility vehicles in the United States are being recalled because the passenger-side air bag may fail to deploy in a crash.

According to documents posted Wednesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jaguar Land Rover will recall 40,551 LR2 and Range Rover Evoque models to fix the electronic system that determines whether someone is sitting in the passenger seat.

In the affected vehicles, that system could fail, resulting in the front-seat passenger's air bag being totally or partly disabled.

Many air-bag systems are designed not to deploy if a child is sitting in the front passenger seat. But Jaguar Land Rover, in a letter to the agency, said a problem in its systems could cause signals to be mistakenly sent to shut down the passenger air bag, even if an adult is in the seat.

The company said that updating the software would prevent the problem and that it would notify owners. Two Land Rover models are affected: 17,066 LR2s from 2010-15 and 23,485 Evoques from 2012-13.

The agency said there had been no reports of accidents related to the issue.

Federal auto safety regulators have intensified their focus on air-bag problems after General Motors' safety crisis, which started in February when 2.6 million older G.M. cars like the Chevrolet Cobalt were revealed to have defective ignition switches that could turn off when bumped or jostled, shutting off the engine and disabling the air bags.

Last month, the agency opened an inquiry into the potential failure of passenger air bags in 320,000 Chevrolet Impala sedans, tied to the same kind of electronic air-bag system at issue in the Land Rover recalls.

In the Impala's case, the problem being investigated is whether the software algorithm that controls the passenger-side air bag is faulty. With the Land Rovers, a problem with the system's memory is suspected of causing the faulty computer signals.

The agency's Impala inquiry was prompted by a formal complaint to the regulator, known as a defect petition, filed in November by Donald Friedman, an engineer at a California crash analysis company. Mr. Friedman investigated a Texas crash where the driver's-side air bag deployed but not the passenger's, despite the passenger's weighing 170 pounds.