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/.

Self-Driving Cars: More Bumps in the Road

In what is probably the most detailed reporting on Google's self-driving cars to appear so far, New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger shows just how far the technology has advanced since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its first Grand Challenge race of autonomous vehicles in the Mojave Desert in 2004.  Nobody came even close to finishing that first race, but only a year later the lessons learned from the inaugural debacles paid off when five vehicles completed the 132-mile course.  Today, Google's fleet of self-driving cars regularly plies roads in California, where the legislature recently passed new licensing laws making it legal to ride in such a vehicle without actually driving it.  But as Bilger briefly points out, a lot remains to be done before you can reasonably expect to own (or at least ride in) a self-driving car yourself.  And in my opinion, technology is not the main stumbling block.

A couple of years ago, I wrote in this blog that I perceived at least two problems which stood in the way of self-driving cars:  unexplored technical problems that might arise if lots of them were on the road all at once, and the reluctance of drivers to hand over the wheel to a robot.  I now think that the first issue has probably been overcome (or easily can be if it arises), and the second issue will take care of itself as the technology becomes more available and peer pressure or necessity (would you rather be told you're too old to drive, or buy a car that can drive itself?) convinces reluctant drivers to hand over the keys to Cyborg. 

But Bilger touches on what I now believe is the single most important obstacle that might slow the spread of autonomous vehicles, at least in the U. S.:  the conservatism of U. S. automotive engineers. 

Bilger spoke with representatives of several car companies:  GM, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, and Volvo, among others.  Ford and GM continue to make incremental "driver-assist" options available, but don't seem enthusiastic about self-driving cars at all. Nissan is the only firm that has made a definite commitment to market a self-driving car, with a target date of 2020.  Mercedes is worried about what the currently-required laser dome on the roof will do to styling, and Volvo is concentrating on safety more than autonomy:  their goal is to make fatal crashes in a Volvo essentially impossible.  But whether a robot or a human drives the car is not their primary concern.  Toyota is still recovering from the controversial accusations that their cars were prone to sudden acceleration, and has paid out millions in legal costs as a result.  That firm is probably not eager to market a product that a few accidents could transform into another huge legal liability.

Here is what I think will happen.  In highly congested non-U. S. cities—Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin—auto makers will first market self-driving cars to people for whom car ownership is very expensive in terms of parking and driving aggravation.  Bilger makes the somewhat curious claim that once cars can drive themselves, most people will not feel the need to own one.  I for one fail to see the connection, except in circumstances where it is a positive pain to own a car, such as living in Manhattan. 

Google admits it's not planning to go into the car business.  But if it thinks Ford or GM is going to buy turnkey controls sold by Google and install them in their own products, they have not given sufficient consideration to the power of N. I. H.:  Not Invented Here.  Not only will the U. S. auto engineers be reluctant to hand over critical responsibilities for their products to a bunch of California geeks; the Detroit crowd recognizes that the whole idea of car ownership is tied intimately to the fact that you drive the thing, you don't just ride in it.

Most U. S. automakers sell cars by playing on the emotions of potential car owners.  The idea is "you are what you drive."  Drive a Dodge Ram?  You're a rough, tough guy who can climb mountains while carrying a ton of rocks—in your pickup.  And so on.  The psychological distance between the driver's seat and the passenger seat (even if you're still sitting behind the wheel) is vast.  A car that drives itself isn't a car anymore, it's a one-person bus.  And public transportation in this country is about as sexy as a roomful of old men playing dominoes. 

To sell self-driving cars, the U. S. auto companies would have to retool their whole way of thinking about how cars are sold.  Of course, if buying a car becomes a thing that only really rich people can afford to do (like keeping a chauffeur), and most cars become part of some public transportation network, the marketing job for the auto industry becomes much easier.  They will have to sell only to a few large municipal purchasing agents rather than to millions of individual car owners.  But except in a few quasi-European cities on the U. S. coasts, I simply can't picture this happening to any large extent.  People love their cars too much to let go of them, even if they no longer drive them. 

Perhaps we will go through another U. S. automaker shakeout, like the one that happened in the early 1980s as foreign automotive producers out-manufactured U. S. firms and took over huge tracts of market share.  If lots of people like the idea of not having to drive, but still want to own a car, Nissan will find out when they offer a truly self-driving vehicle.  Legislatures in states where the demand is high will take care of the licensing problem, and if U. S. carmakers ignore or downplay the self-driving car trend after foreign makes start selling, it's their funeral, along with the funerals of those people who die as a result of human-driver error—deaths that Google engineers claim can be reduced drastically once we switch to self-driving vehicles.  And that's another factor that may push U. S. auto manufacturers unwillingly into the self-driving-car business:  insurance companies.  If a large enough database of statistics shows that self-driving cars are, say, four times as safe on average as human-driven ones, insurance rates on the self-driving models will plummet, and people will have to pay more for the privilege of driving rather than letting the computer steer. 

Sooner or later, the sight of driverless cars will no longer attract the attention it does today.  But a lot of things will have to change first, and among the most important are attitudes of engineers, legislatures, and drivers themselves.

Sources:  Burkhard Bilger's article "Auto Correct" appeared on pp. 96-109 of the Nov. 25, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.  I addressed the issue of autonomous vehicles in my blog in this space on August 11, 2011.

Toyota Settles Class-Action Gas-Pedal Suit

On August 28, 2009, an off-duty California highway patrolman named Mark Saylor was driving his Lexus (made by Toyota) near Santee, California with three members of his family.  Suddenly the car accelerated to speeds of up to 100 MPH, and one of the occupants called 911 to report that they were in trouble and the car “had no brakes.”  Seconds later, the Lexus collided with another vehicle, rolled down an embankment, and caught fire, killing everyone inside.  This was the first highly publicized incident in what came to be known as Toyota’s gas-pedal problem.

On Mar. 6, 2010, I blogged on what had transpired since that and other similar sudden-acceleration incidents had come to light with regard to a variety of Toyota models.  By then, Toyota had already been cited by the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for a letter it sent out to owners about the problem which the NHTSA said was “misleading.”  Toyota later paid a fine to the NHTSA for not notifying the agency promptly enough when reports of unintended acceleration began to reach the automaker. 

There were at least two main suspected causes of these incidents.  One, which Toyota admitted and issued massive recall notices to fix, involved a misfit between the gas pedal and certain floor mats that could catch in the pedal mechanism, making it difficult or impossible to slow down.  The second suspected cause was that glitches in the control software that interfaces between the gas pedal and the engine were appearing randomly or in response to unpredictable RF interference, for example.  Toyota has insisted all along that there is no problem with the software.

But now, after a large class-action lawsuit was filed against the company in California, Toyota has offered a $1-billion settlement which has yet to be approved by the judge in the case.  However, it looks like the worst may be over for the car company.

The details of how the settlement breaks down are interesting, to say the least.  Apparently to widen the class of harmed individuals, lawyers in the suit are suing on behalf of anyone who sold or traded Toyotas between September of 2009 and the end of 2010, presumably because the resale value of all Toyotas was depressed by the ongoing bad news.  Under the proposed settlement, that particular class is getting $250 million as compensation.  Toyota has developed a “brake-override” system that will evidently guarantee your ability to stop the car even if you put a brick on the accelerator (which is not recommended in any case).  Some Toyotas can’t accommodate this new system as a retrofit, so owners of those vehicles get up to $125 apiece instead; the rest get the brake-override system installed free of charge.  About $400 million is going for extended warranties on several components that came under suspicion during the investigation:  tail-light switches, onboard computers, and so on.  And the lawyers, without whom this whole settlement would not have been possible, get $227 million. Such is justice in today’s world.

Toyota does not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement, although it is pretty clear that they have decided things are amiss enough to spend a billion dollars fixing them.  To put this amount in perspective, Toyota’s total revenues for the year ending March of 2012 was $226 billion.  So a billion dollars is not a huge chunk of their revenues, though it will certainly cut into their profits, which run a few billion dollars a year when they make money at all.  Nevertheless, the financial world generally looks kindly upon Toyota at this news, because it clears up a good deal of the uncertainty surrounding the cloud of lawsuits arising from the acceleration problem.

The unintended-acceleration problem is a good example of how non-technical factors begin to enter into a problem once it has entered the public mind.  It is possible (though not likely) that a similar crisis could strike any engineering-intensive business with a large customer base of non-technical consumers.  Rumors do spread, even if they are not founded in fact.  One instinctive response that many engineers might take toward such a situation—the spread of unfounded rumors about a technical problem—would be simply to state the technical reasons and results of tests that show the rumor to be false. 

If everyone listening were engineers, this action alone might clear up the issue.  But most people, thank God, are not engineers.  And hearing a bunch of incomprehensible techno-speak will not allay their fears about an unlikely but graphically grisly possibility of something as awful as dying in a car crash caused by a runaway accelerator you are helpless to control.  After a good bit of fumbling early on, Toyota’s public relations and legal departments got their acts together and came up with a settlement that seems to go the extra mile to alleviate not only the technical problems Toyota itself discovered—the gas-pedal-floormat interference—but a range of other issues which may or may not be based in reality:  extended warranties for parts that some people think may be defective, and a new technical fix that will prevent accidents from unintended acceleration even if the driver does something stupid like stomping on the gas and the brake at the same time.

And drivers do stupid things sometimes, no doubt about it.  An investigation sponsored by the U. S. government found that most of the cases of unintended acceleration were due to driver error.  This could mean anything from a loose bottle of shampoo rolling under the gas pedal at the wrong time to a person freezing stiff-legged in terror as the car roars out of control.  But if the new brake-override system really does its job, Toyotas will have an edge over most other cars that don’t have it.  And a brake-override system may become standard on all new cars in the future, which would be a generally good thing, I suppose.

But it’s too bad that the process took so long, cost so much money, and involved so many lawyers.  However, that’s the way things get done in today’s systems of justice, where problems are always viewed with one eye on the bottom line.  Let’s hope that automotive engineers of the future, both at Toyota and elsewhere, will pay more attention to customer complaints and be more proactive when similar safety problems arise.

Sources:  I referred to an article “Toyota in $1.1 Billion Gas-Pedal Settlement” in the Dec. 27, 2012 online edition of the Wall Street Journal at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324669104578203440990704994.html

.