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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Takata scandal adds to troubled history of air bags

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LOS ANGELES — Driving a 2002 Honda Civic, Huma Hanif was traveling on a highway outside Houston on March 31 when the high school student ran into a car in front of her.

Hanif’s car was equipped with an air bag made by Japanese supplier Takata Corp. The air bag ruptured with the collision, sending a metal shard into her neck, and the 17-year-old died at the scene, authorities said.

It was the 10th fatality in the United States linked to Takata’s defective air bags, expanding what already has become one of the worst scandals in U.S. consumer-safety history. More than 100 injuries also are linked to the air bags.

Five weeks after Hanif’s death, federal safety regulators expanded a nationwide recall of Takata’s air bags to an astonishing 69 million air bag inflators in vehicles made by more than 14 automakers, the largest recall in U.S. automotive history. The recall is so massive that it will take until nearly 2020 to fix all of the faulty air bags, meaning potentially lethal cars remain on the road.

The scandal has slowly but steadily spread in the last decade with Takata, the automakers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration all struggling to come to grips with the extent, and the cause, of the problem.

The Takata scandal also added to the troubled history of air bags, which became widespread standard equipment in the 1990s and have saved thousands of lives. Many cars now have multiple air bags inside.

“Are air bags worth it? The answer is yes,” said Rosemary Shahan, founder of the advocacy group Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety.

But the safety innovation has come with a price. In the 1990s, for instance, more than 200 people — the majority of them children — died in accidents in which an air bag deployed with fatal force.

That crisis eased with a public-awareness campaign urging that young children sit in the rear seat, along with advances in air bag, automotive and child car-seat technology.

Problems also have surfaced during the manufacturing process. There were more than 18 explosions or fires in factories that made air bag components from 1988 to 1997, Newsday reported in 1997. In 2006, a Takata plant in Mexico blew up.

Then the safety of the air bags themselves was called into question again in 2009, when an Oklahoma teenager was killed after the Takata air bag ruptured in her 2001 Honda Accord. That was the first of the 10 fatal U.S. accidents linked to the Takata product.

In November, NHTSA levied a $70 million fine against Takata — which could grow to $200 million if the supplier fails to meet certain requirements — and accelerated the recall campaign. The safety administration accused Takata of “delay and denial” in acknowledging the defective air bags.

“In hindsight, it looks so stupid. How could this happen?” said Christopher Tang, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and a consumer-safety expert.

“This is a problem with business ethics,” Tang said. Takata “realized there was a problem, and they covered it up.”

When NHTSA expanded the recall early this month, it said “the science clearly shows” the root cause of the problem was the device that inflates the air bag in milliseconds after impact.

Time, humidity and “fluctuating high temperatures” cause a propellant chemical inside the inflators — ammonium nitrate — to degrade, the agency said. When that happens, the propellant burns too fast, ruptures the inflator’s casing and sends shrapnel flying through the bag.

So the agency is doing the recall in phases, depending on the cars’ exposure to those causes. The recall will last through 2019.

In the recall, automakers are using replacements with inflators from other suppliers that don’t contain ammonium nitrate, along with Takata replacements. About two-thirds of Takata’s replacement inflators also come from other suppliers, and those Takata makes itself now have a drying agent to offset the ammonium nitrate.

Asked to comment, Takata reiterated its statement issued early this month when NHTSA expanded the recall, in which Takata said it was “committed to supporting all actions that advance vehicle safety.”

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