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A Cheaper Airbag, and Takata’s Road to a Deadly Crisis

Shaving a few dollars off the price of a ubiquitous auto part helped save an obscure Japanese company, and led to the auto industry’s biggest recall.

By HIROKO TABUCHIAUG. 26, 2016

In the late 1990s, General Motors got an unexpected and enticing offer. A little-known Japanese supplier, Takata, had designed a much cheaper automotive airbag.

G.M. turned to its airbag supplier — the Swedish-American company Autoliv — and asked it to match the cheaper design or risk losing the automaker’s business, according to Linda Rink, who was a senior scientist at Autoliv assigned to the G.M. account at the time.

But when Autoliv’s scientists studied the Takata airbag, they found that it relied on a dangerously volatile compound in its inflater, a critical part that causes the airbag to expand.

“We just said, ‘No, we can’t do it. We’re not going to use it,’” said Robert Taylor, Autoliv’s head chemist until 2010.

Today, that compound is at the heart of the largest automotive safety recall in history. At least 14 people have been killed and more than 100 have been injured by faulty inflaters made by Takata. More than 100 million of its airbags have been installed in cars in the United States by General Motors and 16 other automakers.

Details of G.M.’s decision-making process almost 20 years ago, which has not been reported previously, suggest that a quest for savings of just a few dollars per airbag compromised a critical safety device, resulting in passenger deaths. The findings also indicate that automakers played a far more active role in the prelude to the crisis: Rather than being the victims of Takata’s missteps, automakers pressed their suppliers to put cost before all else.

“General Motors told us they were going to buy Takata’s inflaters unless we could make a cheaper one,” Ms. Rink said. Her team was told that the Takata inflaters were as much as 30 percent cheaper per module, she added, a potential savings of several dollars per airbag. “That set off a big panic on how to compete…

Self-Regulation Gone Wrong

Airbag design and performance specifications are set by a consortium of automakers, with little involvement by safety regulators. In congressional testimony, Takata has insisted that specifications set by the automakers did not anticipate the problems caused by exposure to heat and humidity over many years.

But a review of the consortium’s design and performance specifications by The Times shows the automotive industry had raised concerns about the risks of ammonium nitrate more than a decade ago.

A 2004 update to its specifications singled out ammonium nitrate inflaters and required them to “undergo added stability evaluation.”

The specifications from the consortium, known as the United States Council on Automotive Research, show a clear understanding of the damaging effects of moisture and temperature on airbag explosives. Inflaters must be evaluated for their “resistance to temperature aging in an environment of high humidity,” the specifications said.

The problem, it appears, is that no one enforced the specifications.

The update in the specifications was issued four years before Honda, the automaker most affected by the defective airbags, started issuing recalls in 2008. It was not until 2013 that other automakers started recalling cars with the airbags. Today, 64 million of the defective airbags have been subject to the recall...