Time To Make Airbags Optional?

For at least a couple of years, we have known that certain airbag inflators made by the Japanese firm Takata have been exploding like small bombs, sending shrapnel into drivers and passengers who otherwise would almost certainly have survived the collisions that set off the airbags.  A recent investigative article published in the New York Times says that at least fourteen people have died as a result of exploding airbags.  There's no good way to die, but getting killed by a defective safety device has to be one of the worst.  And especially if the company making the things was doing a coverup to keep selling them, as the Times reports.

The coverup was revealed in testimony taken as part of a lawsuit filed by Honda against Takata.  The active chemical in many Takata inflators is ammonium nitrate (AN), the same stuff that was responsible for the explosion in West, Texas in 2013.  One of the main attractions of AN is that it's cheap, which is one reason that Takata has historically been so successful in beating out competitive inflator companies.  But AN easily absorbs water and can undergo changes when subjected to heat or humidity that make it much more likely to detonate when ignited.  There's a difference between fast controlled burning, which is what an inflator is supposed to do, and detonation, which is a practically instantaneous explosion that will shatter almost any container.  And preventing AN from detonating involves keeping all moisture away from it for as long as it's in the car, which can be many years. 

Accordingly, automakers buying Takata inflators insisted that the company do very sensitive leak tests of its containers.  These tests involved injecting a certain amount of helium gas into a container before sealing it, and then putting the whole thing in a vacuum chamber attached to a helium mass spectrometer that can detect only a few molecules of helium, which ordinarily is not present in sea-level air.  It's a great system when it's not abused.  But the only problem was that the containers being tested at Takata's plant in LaGrange, Georgia, kept flunking. 

So the engineers decided to fudge the results.  They pumped down the vacuum chamber several times, "testing" the same container repeatedly until it ran out of helium.  Then they checked it off as passing, put new bar codes on it to conceal what they'd done, and reported that the container passed.  One engineer involved in this scheme complained to his manager about the deception, and was told "not to come back to any more meetings."  He subsequently quit the company.

Up till now, it looked like the worst that Takata was guilty of was gross incompetence, but now there is evidence of outright fraud. 

When I blogged about this matter in 2014, I fully disclosed that both of the cars my wife and I drive are affected by the airbag recall.  We are certainly not alone.  It now looks like over sixty million of the suspect inflators are out there somewhere, and at least nine separate carmakers are struggling to manage the most massive and nightmarish recall in automotive history.  Right now I am waiting to hear from our local Honda dealer about a recall notice we received for our Element last July, telling us that the passenger-side inflator was suspect and we should get it replaced.  Only, they didn't have replacement parts yet, so in the meantime, try not to let anybody sit there.  Now and then I still live dangerously and sit in the passenger seat anyway.  I can only imagine what this has done to the resale value of the vehicle.  So we'll hang onto it until Honda gets a replacement inflator for it.  But I'm not exactly happy to learn from the Times article that the replacement inflator may use ammonium nitrate too.

This whole sad situation brings up a question that was supposedly settled back in the 1990s, when airbags became mandatory on new cars in the U. S.  Can we afford the incremental added protection airbags provide in the light of the hassle, and now hazards, they involve? 

In a calculation performed back in 2005, a writer at the libertarian website Freakonomics claimed that he'd figured out how much it costs to save a life with a seatbelt versus an airbag.  I don't know the details of his calculations, but the results are astonishing.  Seatbelts are pretty cost-effective as safety devices go.  It's about $30,000 to save a life with a seatbelt.  Airbags?  Not so much.  They are vastly more complicated and are effective mainly in head-on collisions.  So the cost to save a life with an airbag is—fasten your seatbelt—$1.8 million.  Now this fellow said that $1.8 million still isn't bad by regulatory standards.  If it was my life saved by an airbag, I would be glad that somebody, somewhere spent that $1.8 million.  But that calculation was done before the massive airbag recall happened, and so you would have to add on to that figure however many millions of dollars have been spent by the automakers on the recall, not to mention the time, anxiety, and waste associated with such recalls.  And the isolated but not negligible accidents involving deaths or injuries directly attributable to airbags.  I've heard that some people have simply stopped driving cars with defective airbags.  This is a little extreme, but if you have another car you can use, I can understand.

It has always seemed a little dubious to me to install shock-triggered explosive charges in cars, even if they are proved to be a lifesaving measure.  And now we have even more reason to wonder whether it might not be a bad idea to make airbag use optional.  Because even properly working airbags can be hazardous to small children, I believe some cars were equipped to turn off airbags if the weight of a child was detected on the corresponding seat.  The way things are now, if I knew how to disable the airbags in my cars, I'd do it, but they're so complicated nowadays I'd have to go to half a year of technician school and even then I'd probably end up setting the thing off when I tried to disconnect it.  You shouldn't have to be qualified as a bomb disarmer to work on your own car, but that's the way it is these days.

In the meantime, let's hope that whoever is making the replacement airbag inflators does a really good job this time, and the millions of car owners around the world driving around with potential bombs can get rid of them.  But maybe it's time to reconsider the whole question of whether using airbags is something that a government should order you to do, or something that is best left to the decision of the consumer.

Sources:  The article "A Cheaper Airbag, and Takata's Road to a Deadly Crisis" by Hiroko Tabuchi appeared in the Aug. 26, 2016 online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/business/takata-airbag-recall-crisis.html.  I also referred to a useful website where updates on the crisis over the last two years have been collected, at http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/.  The Freakonomics piece appeared at http://freakonomics.com/2005/07/18/which-would-you-rather-have-a-seat-belt-or-an-air-bag/, and my previous blog on this subject appeared on Oct. 27, 2014 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/do-not-sit-here-exploding-airbag-recall.html.

Do Not Sit Here: The Exploding Airbag Recall

Airbags are a required safety feature on cars sold in the U. S. since at least 1998.  They have undoubtedly saved lives, especially in situations where the driver or passengers neglected to use seatbelts.  So whatever else we say about them, we should bear in mind that overall, cars are probably safer with airbags than without them.  But only if the airbags themselves are safe.  And lately, some drivers have found that the airbag cure was much worse than the accident disease.

Over a hundred injuries and at least two fatalities have been attributed to defective airbags made by Japanese supplier Takata.  According to the New York Times, in 2009 a 33-year-old mother of three ran into a mail truck in Richmond, Virginia, and her airbag deployed.  The injuries from the wreck itself were minor.  But a piece of shrapnel from the metal canister containing the airbag explosive shot through her neck and she allegedly bled to death as a result. 

For an airbag to be an effective cushion during a collision, it has to deploy in well under a tenth of a second.  This involves creating a large volume of high-pressure gas in a short time.  The early airbags used an explosive called sodium azide, but the residue was toxic. So in the 1990s, manufacturers began to research other chemicals that would be less noxious and also allow for a smaller propellant package. 

Takata, one of the largest airbag suppliers in the world, developed a compound based largely on good old ammonium nitrate (the same chemical involved in the West, Texas explosion on April 17, 2013), along with other components designed to moderate the tendency of this substance to detonate and to absorb moisture.  The manufacture of any product involving explosives requires rigorous adherence to procedures that maintain the integrity of the ingredients all the way from the raw materials to the finished item.  But as various documents have indicated, Takata has not always been sufficiently diligent in their manufacturing processes.

As Takata has responded to inquiries by automaker customers and regulatory agencies, it has admitted to several manufacturing errors over the years.  Again according to the Times, one set of defective airbags was attributed to workers in a Mexican assembly plant who allowed moisture-sensitive explosive ingredients to sit on the plant floor too long in a humid environment.  Other documents show rusty propellant containers and foreign objects in the propellant cans may have been responsible.  Problems with the airbags began to show up as long ago as 2004, and in a series of widening recalls in the last few months, eleven automakers have recalled over 14 million vehicles for replacement of suspect airbags made by Takata.  Many of the vehicles being recalled are in the most humid states in the U. S., which indicates that deterioration due to high humidity is the main culprit here.  Toyota has told its dealers that if the replacement airbags on a recalled vehicle are not immediately available, they should put a sticker on the dashboard next to the defective airbag.  The sticker reads "Do Not Sit Here."  Good luck with that.

This particular story comes close to home, personally.  In our Honda household we operate both a Civic and an Element.  They are very good cars, but neither has been in a major collision that set off the airbags.  For this I am grateful.  I checked their VINs (vehicle identification numbers) at a U. S. government website designed to let owners know of any recalls out on their vehicles, and hit the jackpot both times.  I don't think I'll wait for the dealer to write me.  My 89-year-old father-in-law rides in the passenger seat of the Element.  It would be a shame for a World War II U. S. Navy veteran of the Pacific theater to be cut down by a defective Japanese airbag.  But it could happen, at least until I get those airbags replaced. 

As hazards go, this one is not worth lying awake nights about, unless maybe you work for Takata or one of the affected automakers.  As long as you're not in a wreck, apparently the airbags won't spontaneously combust, and most of them appear to work properly, especially if you don't live in an area that's particularly humid (watch out, Houstonians!).  But even a few defective airbags are too many. 

We won't know for some time why it took so long to uncover the problems and do something about them.  But some contributing factors are apparent already.  First, the problem arose not in a particular automaker's design (as was the case with the GM ignition recall), but with a supplier's manufacturing process.  It is impossible to test an airbag non-destructively, so except for sample testing, which automakers may or may not do, I'm not sure how they could have caught the problem by incoming inspections of Tanaka's product. 

People can be injured even by airbags that work properly and have no design or manufacturing defects, so sorting out incidents that involve defective airbags from those that don't is not a trivial problem, except in the glaringly obvious cases when metal shards from the airbag tear it to ribbons and slice into passengers.  And while the automakers did the minimum required when they received word about the airbag injuries, which was to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within five days, they don't have to give a lot of details.  And if the feds choose not to follow up the notification, the matter ends there, as it did for most of the last ten years.  Only when lawsuits and headlines began to pop up about the matter did the automakers start issuing recalls and pressured Takata to shape up.

I don't know what Takata's market share in the airbag industry is, but my guess is it's pretty high.  Companies that sell products to large OEM (original equipment manufacturer) firms often develop too-chummy relationships with their few customers, who in turn are reluctant to threaten to take their business elsewhere if problems arise.  It's the old monopoly problem, but in this case the consumer is harmed not by exploitative prices—I'm sure the automakers pressured Takata to keep their prices down—but by defective merchandise.  Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for this type of structural problem, except for buyers and regulators to be increasingly vigilant for signs that there is a manufacturing problem.

If you happen to drive one of the fourteen million vehicles affected by the recall, here's hoping you get your car to the dealer soon—and you get it back with something better than a "Do Not Sit Here" sticker.

Sources:  Car and Driver magazine's online edition carried a report on the recall that I referred to, at http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/.  I also referred to the New York Times article published online on Sept. 11, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known-led-to-recalls.html.  The U. S. NHTSA's VIN recall website is at https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin/.