Detonating Honda City airbag kills pregnant woman

THERE’S good news and bad news in this update on shrapnel-shooting airbags, which this column in Nov. 12, 2014, headlined with the question: “Is there one in your car?”

The good news is that many of the 15 million motor vehicles being recalled worldwide for defective airbags made by Takata are old models—2008 or older. The bad news is that the danger is closer to us than we thought.

In Sibu, Malaysia, one evening last July, a pregnant 43-year-old woman driving a 2003 Honda City bled to death after the airbag deployed and sprayed metal fragments into her neck when her car collided with a turning car.

A Honda spokesman in Malaysia said the cause of death was the rupturing of the airbag’s inflater. Doctors tried to save the woman’s baby by performing an emergency operation but the infant, a girl, died two days later.

So far, at least five deaths and many more injuries have been linked to defective airbags made by Takata, but before the fatality in Malaysia, the previous four were in the United States.

Tokyo-based Takata is one of only three large airbag manufacturers in the world. The airbag-linked death in Malaysia tends to confirm that about one in five cars worldwide is equipped with Takata airbags. It likewise indicates that faulty airbag inflaters or propellants, which are made in North American plants, also end up overseas. The Honda City in the Malaysian airbag incident was manufactured in Thailand.

CHEAP PROPELLANT. Some experts trace the defective airbags problem to 2001, when Takata switched to a cheaper airbag propellant, ammonium nitrate, which is highly sensitive to temperature changes and moisture and breaks down over time.

When it breaks down, it can combust violently, making it more suitable for large demolitions in mining and construction than for helping to inflate airbags in cars. But ammonium nitrate is much cheaper than tetrazole, the compound that Takata was using.

The news about Takata’s unstable propellant reinforces this column’s earlier warning that since the Philippine climate is highly humid and subject to temperature changes and moisture, vehicles fitted with Takata airbags may pose a threat to their drivers.

In the United States, doubts about Takata’s propellant raised questions of whether the recall should cover only highly humid regions like Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. After an exploding airbag in a 2007 Ford Mustang in North Carolina injured the driver and an airbag rupture in a Honda occurred in California, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) expanded the recall nationwide. The US recall covers more than 11 million vehicles.

Aside from Honda, other brands included in the worldwide airbag recall are Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, BMW, General Motors, Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, Lexus and Infiniti. Only Chrysler and BMW are limiting their recall to the highly humid regions in the United States.

SENATE HEARINGS. Following the NHTSA’s expansion order, Japan’s Transport Ministry issued a direct order to Takata to thoroughly investigate its airbag problem and provide the Japanese government with more information. At the same time, the US Senate conducted hearings in Washington where NHTSA and Takata executives were grilled about the detonating airbags and their delays in acting on the flaws.

Four incidents of airbag ruptures have been reported in Japan so far, but no injuries were reported. Aside from ordering Takata to conduct an investigation of its safety problem, the Transport Ministry also ordered 10 domestic and foreign automakers to speed up efforts to notify owners and fix their vehicles.

By September, 58 percent of the 2.37 million vehicles subject to Takata airbag recalls had been repaired, the ministry said. But 200,000 more vehicles have been added to the list in Japan under the expanded driver’s side airbag recall, all of them Honda and Mazda cars.

Meanwhile, Honda Motor, Takata’s largest customer, said an audit found that from mid-2003 through mid-2014, it did not report 1,729 written claims or notices on injuries or deaths in the United States linked to possible defects in its vehicles, outnumbering the 907 reports that it did make during that period to federal safety regulators. In a statement, Honda said the audit attributed the underreporting to “inadvertent” errors in data entry and coding.

FLAWS. The audit was commissioned by Honda and conducted by an outside law firm. Honda North America said it would correct its computer programming and coding flaws, expand its reporting of third-party documentation like police reports, and retrain its workers on data entry methods. Honda Motor has recalled 6.2 million cars with Takata airbags worldwide, by far the most among the car manufacturers.

“Inadvertent” was also the word used by Ferrari last month to describe its failure to comply with federal reporting requirements in the United States. Safety regulators penalized Ferrari with a $3.5-million fine for not submitting reports of fatal accidents to the government.

Last May, the NHTSA imposed a $35-million penalty, the maximum allowed, on General Motors for failing to report, within the period of time required by law, a dangerously defective ignition switch in millions of older small cars despite knowing about it for the last 10 years.

Reading about how the governments of the United States and Japan run after erring automakers and suppliers, one wonders: when will the Philippine government be as dedicated to advancing automobile and road safety for the greater public good? Given our sluggish legal system and ambivalent attitude toward automobile safety issues, don’t hold your breath. With reports from The INYT and Reuters