Ford to launch recall of 2.9 million vehicles for air bag inflators

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co said on Friday it will begin notifying owners April 1 in its new recall of 2.9 million vehicles in North America with potentially defective driver-side Takata air bags after U.S. regulators demanded the fix in January.

The second largest U.S. automaker said in January it would comply with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration request and that the recall would cost $610 million. The defect, which leads in rare instances to air bag inflators rupturing and sending potentially deadly metal fragments flying, prompted the largest automotive recall in U.S. history of more than 67 million inflators.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler)