Daimler recalls over 1 million vehicles worldwide for air bag fix

BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Daimler AG is recalling more than 1 million Mercedes-Benz cars and sport utility vehicles worldwide to address potential unintended air bag deployments, the German automaker 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. The German automaker did not immediately have a complete worldwide total.

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 air bag 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 air bag problem.

No deaths have been reported and the issue is not related to the massive recall of Takata air bag inflators worldwide.

The recalls covers some 2012-2018 model year A, B, C, and E-Class models and CLA, GLA and GLC vehicles.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer and David Shepardson; Editing by Maria Sheahan and Tom Brown)