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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.
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?...
What about recalling guns? Save more lives... ;-)
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