Defective Takata airbags still being sold in 2016/17 i-MiEVs

[Benjamin Nead]

This item in today's news: The Takata air bag recall, the "largest and most complex safety recall in U.S. history" according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA,) is expanding.

Four automakers - Fiat/Chrysler, Toyota, Volkswagen and Mitsubishi - are, according to a Senate Commerce Committee report, continuing to sell some new vehicle with these defective Takata units. These ammonium nitrate air bag inflators lack a proper drying agent that can cause ruptures. It's tied to the age of the inflators, as well as exposure to high humidity and fluctuating temperatures. When the airbags are deployed, they can expel metal shards, which have been tied to as many as 13 deaths and 100 injuries.

And, yes, the 2016/17 i-MiEV is one of them and the sole new model in the Mitsubishi lineup listed . . .

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-four-automakers-still-using-faulty-takata-inflators/

It's shocking to hear that two of the manufacturers listed aren't yet even disclosing which models they're selling that are affected (Fiat/Chrysler and Toyota,) Volkswagen and Mitsubishi have at least listed the specific ones. I suppose they felt obligated, since both of them have been dragged through the mud with other scandals lately and, hey . . . why further add to the misery? :roll:

According to the CBS article: "Mitsubishi said it's working with a supplier to develop another inflator to replace the Takata devices, which it expects will be ready early next year. The Takata inflators that it's currently using "have not been declared defective, but current understanding is that Takata will file with NHTSA a Defect Information Report applicable to these inflators in December 2018," the company said in a statement."

But there should be some concern among those of us who have older i-MiEVs and who recently took their cars in for the Takata recall replacement . . .

"The report found that at least 2.1 million of the inflators that have been replaced in the recall are the same type that are linked to the defect. They will have to be replaced again in the future," it noted."

So, if I'm reading this last article quote correctly, Mitsubishi may have had you come in to a dealership recently to yank out your old (dangerous) Takata airbag and then PUT IN NEW EXAMPLES OF THE EXACT SAME DEFECTIVE AIRBAG?!?

Jeez! I was going to make an appointment to take my car into the Phoenix dealership for the airbag replacement later this month, but I'm going to wait until the new non-Takata ones are ready in 2017.

 

[PV1]

I wonder if this affects older i-MiEVs that haven't had their airbag modules swapped out. I don't believe either of my cars had to have this done. I've only had issues with an impact sensor in the front of the car.

Doesn't someone besides Takata manufacture airbags?

 

[Benjamin Nead]

Well, that's the great mystery. The Takata recall is massive and there are tens of millions of cars affected from virtually every automobile manufacturer.
It's been reported for months that there's is a significant shortage of non-defective Takata replacement units. The shortage is so widespread that
auto manufacturers are continuing to build and sell new cars with these defective bags. That's the main thrust of the news of June 1. Bad enough
on it's own and a damn shame that the 2016/17 i-MiEV gets dragged into the daily news for that reason alone.

But it's this part of the article (quoted in my first post, above,) that bears repeating (I'm adding my underlining for emphasis, below,)
for us with older i-MiEVs . . .

"The report found that at least 2.1 million of the inflators that have been replaced in the recall are the same type
that are linked to the defect. They will have to be replaced again in the future"

If that many defective airbags (2.1 million) have already been swapped out of older cars and it was a known fact (by manufacturers, not consumers)
that fresh examples of the exact same defective airbag was being swapped in - simply because there's such a massive shortage of purported
"good" ones - then this is a scandal worthy of it's own story.

2,100 (the estimated number of all North American i-MiEVs) is just 0.1% of that 2.1 million figure. So, yeah, it's conceivable that every one
of the older i-MiEVs (far less than the 2,100 total production figure) that has been serviced by dealers for this recall are affected. I'm only
speculating, but it's up to Mitsubishi to come clean and let those vehicle owners know.

Getting back to new vehicles being sold with defective bags: the shocker for me was that Toyota fully admitted that it would be continuing to sell
new vehicles with defective bags through July 2017 and has refused to say which models. Mitsubishi, to their credit, has at least identified
the affected model (2016/17 i-MiEV) and said that it would be using a non-Takata airbag (thank heavens for that) as of early 2017.
But until then . . . ?

Hence, I think it's a pointless exercise to take my 2012 i-MiEV into the dealer so they can swap in/out in the exact same defective Takata air bag.
I'd just as soon wait until early 2017 and have the job done once and with something that doesn't have a Takata label on it.

 

[PV1]

I had the most recent SRS recall done on both cars, but it's listed as impact sensor for both cars. I guess there was another recall for the airbag modules themselves?

Who knows. My main worry with airbags has always been the emblem on the steering wheel. What's to say that thing doesn't fly up and hit the driver in the head?

 

[Benjamin Nead]

I logged thousands of miles from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s - many of them as a full-time professional taxi driver - before I started to regularly wear seat belts. A car that I drove daily from 1986 to 1995 - a 1951 Chevy - had aftermarket lap belts that I used every time I got inside the vehicle. But, with a metal dashboard and the concept of collapsible crush zone or steering columns still decades away from when that car was designed, that old Chevy would have been a deathtrap if I ever got into even a fairly minor accident at surface street speeds.

All that said, we’ve now got airbags in our cars and they have mostly proven themselves to be a reliable safety device that have saved thousands - maybe even millions - of lives. I’m glad they’re there and the design of the system appears to be particularly well implemented on the i-MiEV. One thing I’m not typically fearing with airbags - assuming the units installed in my car are not going to spew metal shards or fail to deploy - is that the emblem in the middle of the steering wheel is going to be an issue, as this film demonstrates . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IzVLvdU1GQ

So, yeah, I paid for these airbags as part of the price of the car (even though I purchased my i-MiEV used at a fraction of the price of a new example) and all the companies who build cars today are required by law to install them. I’d like them to work as designed and hope they’re not going to kill or injure me or a passenger.

To answer a question you asked on a previous post of this thread, I’m sure there are other airbag manufacturers. How Takata was able to corner the market so effectively and become such a high volume supplier to so many OEMs might be explained by the fact that they had a product that seemed to work as designed and was probably more affordable than the competition. But I’ll be surprised they’ll be in business after this whole thing is resolved. I tend to think it will bankrupt them.

From reading the news reports regarding the Takata recall over the last year or so, there seems to be two separate issues with their airbags. Some of the bags are prone to expel metal shards when they deploy. Why they would ever be designed to do that is a mystery to me. But much of the reporting also centers around ammonium nitrate. If it doesn’t ignite, the air bag fails to deploy. So, if the bag doesn’t deploy, that might be just as bad or worse than one that might be a possible shrapnel grenade embedded in the steering column.

One more thing about ammonium nitrate . . . for much of the first decade of this century, I spent a lot of time on the internet talking with chemists about propellants for tiny low thrust rocket motors for model airplane use. I owned and managed a web site called Jetex.org, which was (still is, actually, under a new owner) a technical and historical resource for model airplane hobbyists . . .

http://archivesite.jetex.org/

Jetex is a name of a commercially available micro rocket propulsion motor/fuel system developed for hobbyists which was manufactured in England from the late 1940s to early 1970s. The original 1940s fuel formulation was based around guanidine nitrate and, by all accounts, that chemical worked very well. But a variety of circumstances in the late 1950s witnessed the manufacturer of the Jetex motors switching to a fuel based around ammonium nitrate, a far less elegant substance for this purpose.

In addition to a higher temperature burn and a greater difficulty present to slow down the burn rate when compared to guanidine nitrate (both very important to the particular Jetex application,) it was noted that ammonium nitrate was prone to being hygroscopic (ie: changing its chemical property after exposure to heat or moisture,) So, after listening to any number of knowledgeable chemists tell me over and over again that ammonium nitrate is a generally poor choice for making slow burning fuel for rocket-powered model airplanes, I’d like to think that airbag manufacturers would do well to spend a little more time to develop a guanidine nitrate formulation for their product’s application.

 

[phb10186]

If there were 13 deaths and 100 injuries in millions of 'defective' airbags, then I could draw no other conclusion that these 'defective' airbags are statistically very very safe.

There were 2.1 million replaced, but we don't know how many fitted

Lets say they only made 2.1 million of these (and we know it is a multiple of this), then the death and injury rates are as follows:

Death: 0.0006%

Injury: 0.0048%


The odds of an American being struck by lightening are 1 in 960,000 per year or 0.0001%

So, the odds of one of these air bags killing you in an accident is in the same ball park as being struck by lightening.

The average American lives 78.4 years, so the odds of not waking up after you go to bed averaged over your lifetime are something like 1 in 28,616. Far more dangerous going to bed.

The odds of getting shot and killed in the US in a given year are 30,000 to 1 (a terrible statistic).

The only reason these statistics form the airbag recall hit home hard is these are defined as preventable deaths, attributable to a product, rather than an act of nature. Though the relative risk is tiny.

Would you totally halt production of your entire vehicle line based on those odds? Indeed if you were in charge of vehicle safety, would you logically come to any other conclusion other than to keep going until the replacements can be developed, produced and fitted? - I wouldn't/ couldn't.

 

[wmcbrine]

I think you need to measure deaths/injuries vs. number of actual airbag deployments (or count the times when it failed to deploy), not vs. the total number of units on the road. (Unless spurious deployment were itself the defect.) Sure, it's "safe" if it remains unused.

 

[Benjamin Nead]

Would you totally halt production of your entire vehicle line based on those odds? Indeed if you were in charge of vehicle safety, would you logically come to any other conclusion other than to keep going until the replacements can be developed, produced and fitted?

Well, you apparently didn't read my posts very carefully. It's a damn shame that this car - the one in the line that Mitsubishi seems to have least faith in - is the one that is tarnished by the Takata association. But Mitsubishi sells so few new i-MiEVs in the US (something like one per month) that it would be almost inconsequential if there was a temporary halt in sales. If anything, It might perk up the used i-MiEV market a bit. As a 2012 i-MiEV owner, I'm going to keep the same (potentially defective) airbags I have now. What's the point of having the dealer - which I have to travel over a hundred miles to visit - yank them out, only to replace them with something identical and potentially just as lethal? The real scandal is that I know fellow local i-MiEV owners who have had their airbags swapped out recently and were led to believe that the replacements were safer. They're going to make that long round trip to the dealer once again. One of the linked news articles I posted has a quote from a Mitsubishi spokesman who states that a non-Takata branded replacement is under development and should be available in early 2017. I'll restate that that this is what I'm waiting for.

I think you need to measure deaths/injuries vs. number of actual airbag deployments (or count the times when it failed to deploy), not vs. the total number of units on the road. (Unless spurious deployment were itself the defect.) Sure, it's "safe" if it remains unused.

Exactly.

 

[phb10186]

I think you need to measure deaths/injuries vs. number of actual airbag deployments (or count the times when it failed to deploy), not vs. the total number of units on the road. (Unless spurious deployment were itself the defect.) Sure, it's "safe" if it remains unused.

That would be a superior metric, yes, but there would be many other variables that would need to be controlled, and it's not likely that the figures would be available/ or I cant see how they would be available.

 

[phb10186]

Would you totally halt production of your entire vehicle line based on those odds? Indeed if you were in charge of vehicle safety, would you logically come to any other conclusion other than to keep going until the replacements can be developed, produced and fitted?

Well, you apparently didn't read my posts very carefully. It's a damn shame that this car - the one in the line that Mitsubishi seems to have least faith in - is the one that is tarnished by the Takata association. But Mitsubishi sells so few new i-MiEVs in the US (something like one per month) that it would be almost inconsequential if there was a temporary halt in sales. If anything, It might perk up the used i-MiEV market a bit. As a 2012 i-MiEV owner, I'm going to keep the same (potentially defective) airbags I have now. What's the point of having the dealer - which I have to travel over a hundred miles to visit - yank them out, only to replace them with something identical and potentially just as lethal? The real scandal is that I know fellow local i-MiEV owners who have had their airbags swapped out recently and were led to believe that the replacements were safer. They're going to make that long round trip to the dealer once again. One of the linked news articles I posted has a quote from a Mitsubishi spokesman who states that a non-Takata branded replacement is under development and should be available in early 2017. I'll restate that that this is what I'm waiting for.

I think you need to measure deaths/injuries vs. number of actual airbag deployments (or count the times when it failed to deploy), not vs. the total number of units on the road. (Unless spurious deployment were itself the defect.) Sure, it's "safe" if it remains unused.

Exactly.

I did read your post properly, but I picked out the numbers in my reply, because they really aren't very large at all.

I agree with your post, especially the part about deceptively swapping out an airbag for one that's identically defective - no rationality at all. What should be happening in the recall is the conveyance of that information, which would undoubtedly lead the majority of owners to not bother until correctly manufactured airbags are available.

I certainly wouldnt bother wasting the time to go there so that the dealership can take the car apart to fit the same unimproved device back, and then get paid to do so - in fact you could argue that dealers knowingly carrying that out are doing so unethically (but likely in reality they have no choice).

However, common sense tells me that there may be another part to the story (I may be wrong), but how could anyone with the responsibility for doing so, sign off an order to replace a defective item with the same defective item - it just doesn't sound right. If it is, then the parties involved deserve the negative press they get (unless they have no option to do it).

As far as the I-Miev goes, well its a low volume product; its also the oldest model in the Mitsubishi line up. Mitsubishi probably lost money on every single unit (I would have thought). Also, they would have to re-engineer the SRS system, get it prototyped and tested to conformity, which would cause delays and add cost etc. So in essence, I would have thought at this stage they would either pull the plug or not bother - they are a commercial company after all.

The underlying Takata issue is an amazing one. If the recall is significantly unsafe, then they would have to stop selling vehicles with these fitted, but clearly its not statistically dangerous enough, so the categorisation is made to continue until replacements are available.

There is fall out, but as I said, when you have a domino effect along many production lines like this, as well as already millions of cars sold, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's simply impossible to make enough. In fact - im amazed Takata haven't just declared bankruptcy and thrown in the towel.

The chaos a total stop and implementation of an immediate recall would have is massive, so that's when the numbers become increasingly important.

In an ideal world, you would just source from another supplier, but in this case it's probably not an option. People are dependent on the replacements, and the replacement rate of production does simply not have the capacity to deal with an event on this scale.

 

[Benjamin Nead]

Yes, it is a real mess. I think we can all agree on that point. What amazes me is how far and long this thing has grown. I've lost track how many times (seems like every other week for the past 6 months) that someone on one of the TV newscast starts a report by stating "The Takata airbag recall has expanded again, to now include . . . " It's no exaggeration to state that it is already the largest recall in automotive history and it just seems to get bigger as the weeks roll by.

When I noted that not only new i-MiEVs were affected but that older ones that had already had one set of airbags replaced, I wrote that long post above that started this thread. I'm also amazed that Takata still seems to be soldiering on and hasn't declared bankruptcy yet. My guess, though, is that they won't make it past the end of 2016. We'll also start to see a trend across the entire automotive industry, perhaps even legally mandated in some countries, where multiple suppliers of safety equipment like this will make their own redundant versions of the same product. So, if Brand X airbags for the i-MiEV are proven defective, one has the option to test if Brand Y or Brand Z i-MiEV bags are OK. It's now proven too risky to have just one air bag supplier for what seems like 80% of the worldwide auto industry. I'm sure someone is already compiling data somewhere and that there will a book about this in few years.

 

[phb10186]

If there are only a couple of airbag manufacturers, then they will enjoy a degree of power - as there is no alternative.

Probably far harder to sort this out that is reported in the media. They only report the headlines, they of course do not help with the solution.

 

[Benjamin Nead]

I did happen to find this item from Car & Driver, which seems to be an ongoing chronological listing of Takata recall articles and it appears to be a regularly updated online document . . .

http://blog.caranddriver.com/massiv...now-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/

I was surprised that the timeline stretches back to 2004 and that the actual recall has been slowly unfolding for 3 or 4 years now. Slow motion news stories that grow in scope over time are always the most difficult to track (thinking here about the late 1990s to early 2000s GM EV1 story and why movies like "Who Killed The Electric Car?" are such significant accomplishments.)

Here's another link with general airbag manufacturer information, giving what appears to be a comprehensive listing of who makes them . . .

http://valientmarketresearch.com/industries/automotive-market-research/airbag-market-research/

The good news here is that there are more than just a few companies, beyond Takata, in the airbag business. Interestingly Mitsubishi Electric is on the list!

 

[siai47]

My takeaway on this airbag mess is that there is a corrosion issue involved with the "metal Shards" being expelled. When I first heard about the recalls, I remember that coastal areas or damp areas were targeted first for replacement. I always wondered how you determined if the car you were driving was always driven in dry climates and therefore "safe". I also remember owning a '80's vintage Mercedes-Benz 190E and seeing the sticker in the glove box about the fantastic air bags in the car and the requirement that they be replaced when the bags reached 15 years old. I wonder how many were. Although I wouldn't be perfectly happy, I would feel better about driving a car with new replacement air bags rather than older bags that are corroding and causing the canister to rupture upon deployment---even if they were of the same design. I don't know if Takata is going to survive this, nor do I really care. I doubt they sat in a meeting one day years ago and decided to engineer something that would bankrupt their company and cost everyone involved their jobs. If they were to go out of business, the replacement of these older airbags would grind to a stop as the remaining manufacturers would be hard pressed to design and manufacture replacements for older vehicle designs while meeting the production of airbags for new vehicles. It's a bad situation but it could be worse. If you were a airbag supplier, why would you want to tool up to provide airbags for older cars produced by a small (based on sales) car company like Mitsubishi (who bought airbags from a competitor) and loose valuable production of millions of airbags for hot selling pickups and SUV's? What would you, as and owner, finally do if no replacement was available from anyone at any price? Scrap the car? That's possible. Look at the mess Volkswagen has "engineered" themselves into with the Diesel scandal. Takata was trying to minimize the damage from their problem but it is out of control. If I still owned my I-MiEV's I would still drive them, understanding the risk and evaluating as time passes if it is worth the risk. At this point, I don't think the US I-MiEV fleet is old enough to be concerned about but over time it will be.

 

[phb10186]

one piece of anecdote:

My brother was rear ended in his 2004 Yaris about a month ago, which pushed him into the car in front with enough force to deploy both front airbags.

This is around London, and the climate is fairly damp. Both airbags deployed fine in this 12 year old car with 120K miles. Unsure of the airbag variant, but it goes to show that all systems were working well and good after such a time period.

 

[Benjamin Nead]

I doubt they sat in a meeting one day years ago and decided to engineer something that would bankrupt their company and cost everyone involved their jobs.

Well, it's almost that bad. The first update, dated 11/7/2014, on that Car & Driver article I linked above states: "The New York Times has published a report suggesting that Takata knew about the airbag issues in 2004, conducting secret tests off work hours to verify the problem. The results confirmed major issues with the inflators, and engineers quickly began researching a solution. But instead of notifying federal safety regulators and moving forward with fixes, Takata executives ordered its engineers to destroy the data and dispose of the physical evidence. This occurred a full four years before Takata publicly acknowledged the problem."

If you were a airbag supplier, why would you want to tool up to provide airbags for older cars produced by a small (based on sales) car company like Mitsubishi (who bought airbags from a competitor) and loose valuable production of millions of airbags for hot selling pickups and SUV's? What would you, as and owner, finally do if no replacement was available from anyone at any price? Scrap the car? That's possible.

Yes, it is possible. But, from the first linked CBS article on the first post on this thread:"Mitsubishi said it's working with a supplier to develop another inflator to replace the Takata devices, which it expects will be ready early next year. The Takata inflators that it's currently using "have not been declared defective, but current understanding is that Takata will file with NHTSA a Defect Information Report applicable to these inflators in December 2018," the company said in a statement."

I'd like to think they're not going to recant on this promise. Even though the 2016/17 sells poorly in the US, there are at least a couple thousand 2012/14 models that have (educated guess here) the exact same airbag system. The i-MiEV is also an international car, sold in something like 36 countries. There are tens of thousands of these slightly narrower/shorter versions out there and (again guessing) these likely have the same airbag system, since so much else in the way of parts are shared between these and the North American version. If the scandal spreads (all indications are that it's certainly not slowing down just yet) and other counties insist on suing Takata, someone is going to have to be making lots of replacement airbags for a car that is still, technically, in production.

 

[Benjamin Nead]

one piece of anecdote: My brother was rear ended in his 2004 Yaris about a month ago, which pushed him into the car in front with enough force to deploy both front airbags. This is around London, and the climate is fairly damp. Both airbags deployed fine in this 12 year old car with 120K miles. Unsure of the airbag variant, but it goes to show that all systems were working well and good after such a time period.

The Car & Driver list shows that the 2004 Yaris is in the clear. But 2006/11 ones are part of the recall. But isn't that frustrating on at least one level? The airbag in the older car was actually considered safer!

My i-MiEV lived in snowy Illinois for the first couple of years. I've got a fair amount of surface rust on exposed metal drive train and suspension parts. I also had an interesting encounter with corrosion on the access wing nuts bolts holding down the motor/controller lid, recounted mid way down this page thread with photos . . .

http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1638&start=10

The car also sat at a Los Angeles area dealer - about 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean - for another year before I bought it. So, even though I live in deepest, driest sunny hot Arizona, I could have some pretty badly deteriorated airbag canisters.