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'Largest Recall In American History': Takata To Recall Nearly 70 Million Airbags (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Federal regulators are ordering Japanese supplier Takata to recall as many as 40 million additional airbags linked to a defect already blamed for at least 11 deaths, bringing the total number of faulty airbags in the U.S. to 69 million. Previously, the recall involved about 24 million vehicles sold in the U.S. over roughly the last decade, with 14 manufacturers impacted. With the latest recall, almost every other major carmaker will now be pulled. "This is the largest recall in American history," National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind told reporters on Wednesday. Initial estimates said 35-40 million airbags were to be recalled. And because some vehicles use more than one Takata airbag, the total number of vehicles will likely be smaller. Now it's considered highly likely that the total number of cars, trucks and crossovers will now top the 50 million mark, and as many as a quarter of all vehicles on U.S. roads could be covered. The NHTSA has reported that just over 8 million vehicles had been fixed as of April 22. The airbags have so far been tied to at least 10 U.S. deaths and more than 100 injuries -- two more fatalities in Malaysia were confirmed Wednesday. "The exploding airbags can send shrapnel into the faces and necks of victims, leaving them looking as if they had been shot or stabbed," according to Fox 59.
I bet if you get one of those recall notifications, you drive a LOT more carefully! Get in an accident and risk flesh-ripping SHRAPNEL in the FACE! I wouldn't be surprised if, once this news got around, driving fatalities didn't actually decrease because everyone was driving a lot more carefully. Someone should do a study on that!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You probably won't die but you're definitely getting hurt.
I have a vehicle affected by this and was trying to gauge the appropriate level of alarm. The best info I can find indicates that there have been 88 "rupture" events out of 1.2 million deployment as of last year. So I do not think it makes sense to worry too much at this point, as those are pretty unlikely events, even if it is really more like 1000 bad explosive deployments so far. There do seem to be some concerns about high humidity areas and strong temperature variation locations being more likely to have issues and originally the recalls were focused on the southern US and other warm areas, though now the plan is to replace them all.
Much of the coverage has been alarmist- "your car is going to kill you!" so it was good to see that the fraction is low. But it was very troubling to read about how evasive and duplicitous the manufacturer has been as the problems should have been detected and addressed much earlier.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
downright cromulent.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
it's gold i tell ya.
I'm glad they did not hide this fact from consumers, lest it blow up in their face.
Republicans hate the people.
They constantly murder is but are never punished for it.
It's an unpopular notion but various U.S. Government agencies are required to place a dollar value on a human life in order to make reasonable economic and policy decisions. The exact value of a human life varies by agency but the range is currently about $4M to $9M. With only 11 lives lost from to this airbag fault and a reported 70 million airbags affected by this recall, each likely costly hundreds each to replace, is this recall justified?
For the logical behind this process here is Milton Friedman explaining it to a college student:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Natural selection; she rear ended someone else and brought this onto herself.
Damn... I miss the days when /. had good Trolls, not pathetic milkmaids , like this kid.
The corporations own the government.
Well, Hitler was only one guy, so yeah.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
And I was told that parts won't be in until 2018. Nice, huh?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They said "seat belts would save lives, they did but you had to be responsible to use them." Before that they said "seat belts are unnecessary and presume that our cars are unsafe."
Then they said "airbags would save lives and they did but unless you were a kid in the passenger seat."
Then they said "we've fixed that so we'll just disable the airbag if you're not heavy enough. Put your kids in the back just be sure they said."
Then they said "these airbags can explode and deploy shrapnel they said, so we're recalling them they said."
Then I said "It's been almost two years and mine haven't been replaced, sure the risk is negligible but just like walking down a dark alley at night in a big city, there's always a risk."
I wonder what they'll say in 10 years?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This again is another reason safety agencies at the federal level are almost worthless. How long has these bags been installed in vehicles. It's acceptable I guess to have some injuries even with safety equipment. But of course we now know that these bags were never designed properly or redesigned even after some evidence suggested a flaw. But let's ask ourselves what is truly wrong with our safety systems in cars? They all reflect on reacting to an accident. None of our safety equipment in vehicles has really solved the problems associated with cars. It's like a human will always drown in water if they cannot float. Throw them a life preserver that doesn't float and you don't help anything. Design a air bag that causes just as much injury as an accident and you have not helped. The least human's can do to help save our lives is work harder to not make things worse. Drive better, live longer, don't depend on something saving your life. It may not.
What about recalling guns? Save more lives... ;-)
you worship the spreadsheet but you forgot a whole column: cost of injuries. One single injury can cost millions of dollars when loss of income and long term care are considered.
just like any other worshipper, you neglect the parts of your bible that don't back up your personal vendetta
When the auto industry came up with the airbag decades ago, while doing the sorts of research they used to do lots of (remember gas turbine cars?) they decided not to put them into cars.
In the era of Nader's Raiders, when Ralph Nader was grooming a whole generation of lawyers to weaponize the courts for social justice and using the press to assert that all businesses did the things they do for nefarious purposes, the congress was grilling auto execs (it was great PR for politicians) and began to demand airbags. This was also the era when CBS was getting monster ratings with their ambush journalism on 60 Minutes (which was very different from the modern show). The idea that evil greedy car company bosses were penny-pinching on airbags and people were dying needlessly in car crashes played really well in political circles. This was there era of "unsafe at any speed" which pioneered Michael Moore style activism and scared the public away from a perfectly fine car, the Corvair. The Corvair, (I have experience with several of them) was great little rear-engined car that performed well and was a nice quiet ride, thanks to the air-cooled rear-engine configuration, but could handle a bit differently in some situations due to the engine weight being at the back (like if driven recklessly through curves on slick roads, particularly if nothing was stored under the front hood). Rather than saying "these are a different, innovative design that people familiar with them can drive safely" (which used to be the presumption for all tech products), the idea became: if any innovation can be dangerous in the hands of a reckless idiot, it must be bad and driven from the marketplace.
The federal government began to demand airbags and in the hearings that were held, the auto execs explained why they decided not to put these devices into cars. Their experiments had shown that the bags were more likely to kill women and children than to save them, and that with the tech available at that time they were not even certain that the number of adult males who would be saved would outnumber the ones who would be killed by them, and furthermore by adding these devices they would become legally liable for the deaths caused. The government ended up ordering the adoption of airbags anyway.
After airbags began to be used in cars (years after they were originally invented, and after much better tech had come along to sense collisions and trigger the bags) the car companies were attacked again both in the political real and in the courts, because women and children were being disproportionally killed by airbags (doh!). The auto execs were portrayed as greedy and heartless and incompetent for making systems that were not sufficiently good to adapt to these typically smaller/lighter people, by politicians and lawyers who themselves had never created ANYTHING. As technology advanced, the auto industry was able to add sensors to vehicles to adapt the airbag deployments to the mass of the persons in each seat (something that was essentially impossible early-on). Now they are taking a big hit on the Takata airbags over reliability and injuries and deaths stemming from design/manufacturing issues which were also one of the reasons manufacturers originally opposed airbags (additional liability from adding critical and dangerous extras to the car which could be deadly if imperfectly designed/built).
At every turn in the story, the original position of the auto company execs who resisted putting the things in cars, has been validated. The politicians, lawyers, and journalists who built careers on both sides of the issue (first claiming the car companies were evil for NOT including the bags, and then attacking them for harming people with the bags) never actually did anything productive and difficult themselves. The air bag is a good idea and was a good idea when the auto companies came up with it long ago, but this legal/political/journalistic whiplash is actually a negative thing - it creates an environment where companies are
Instead of putting "AIRBAG" or "SRS" on the steering wheel, they should instead label it "FRONT TOWARD ENEMY."
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Clearly these were installed incorrectly by racist men. Everything Japanese is perfectly awesome and awesomely perfect.
I assume Takata will do what Federal Pacific did when it was discovered their residential Stab-Lock circuit breakers were defective (and that they had willfully falsified test reports for years): declare bankruptcy and close up shop, leaving US consumers like me with circuit breakers that do not break (leading to house fires) and now 'safety devices' that can kill you with shrapnel.
The Miracle of the Marketplace, indeed.
this is the inverse (contrapositive? i didn't pay that much attention in logic101;-) of one of stan mott's cartoons in car&driver waaaay back when...in addition to his brilliant cyclops series (recently introduced as the tata nano https://www.carthrottle.com/po... ;-) he mocked safety regs with a cartoon of ppl driving around in federal safety tanks ramming anyone who got in their way;-}
http://www.deansgarage.com/201...
http://www.darkroastedblend.co...
That the report you cite covers the mid to late 1990s and not the 1960s or 1970s when the airbag tech was truly not ready or the 1980s when it was still not really ready.
If some new government-mandated safety tech is anything less that completely reliable after decades, then there's more at work than just greedy execs. Sometimes the tech itself is not ready. Sometimes the basic tech is ready but the manufacturing capability is not yet up to speed (i.e. process controls, tolerances, consistency, etc still lacking). As with most technology, and contrary to what lawyers,journalists, and politicians may say, it's usually multiple problems that pile up that lead to a disaster and not some simple thing like a greed-head CEO (of which there are plenty in all industries without daily disasters in all industries).