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Takata's faulty airbags still exact toll as recalls lag

 
Published Jan. 31, 2016

ROCK HILL, S.C. — The shrapnel from the Ford Ranger airbag punctured Joel Knight's neck with so much force that investigators initially did not rule out a fatal shooting.

Knight's truck hit a stray cow on a South Carolina highway last month, an accident that should have left Knight, a 52-year-old welder, shaken up but not dead.

Instead, Knight bled to death, not knowing that the airbag in his truck had ever posed a risk, because it had never been recalled.

He most likely did not even know that his airbag had been manufactured by Takata, the Japanese supplier whose faulty airbags have been linked to 10 deaths and more than 100 injuries, said his widow, Ann Knight.

"If he'd have known, he'd have gotten it fixed," said Ann Knight, 50. "He took good care of that truck." She added: "Now something that was supposed to save him killed him."

More than a decade after the first confirmed rupture of a Takata airbag in Alabama, and despite a vast recall spanning 14 automakers, a stark reality remains: Tens of millions of people drive vehicles that may pose a lethal danger but have not been repaired or, as in Joel Knight's case, have not even been recalled.

Since 2000, Takata has sold as many as 54 million metal "inflaters" in the United States containing ammonium nitrate, an explosive compound that regulators believe is at the center of the problem, according to an estimate by Valient Market Research and provided to the New York Times. About 28 million inflaters in 24 million vehicles have been recalled. And of the 28 million recalled inflaters, only about 30 percent have been repaired. The rest of the inflaters, about 26 million, have not been recalled.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has stepped up its scrutiny of the problem, after a series of missteps over nearly a decade, but has stopped short of an immediate recall of all Takata airbags containing the compound. The agency does not have the authority to order people to stop driving the cars and has not advised people to avoid driving them.

Gordon Trowbridge, a spokesman for the safety agency, said that not knowing the exact cause of the ruptures prevented broader recalls.

"It is unknown why some inflaters perform better than others," he said. "It is unknown why the same inflater, with the same propellant formulation, performs better in some vehicles than in other vehicles."

Car manufacturers, at the same time, have been reluctant to sound alarms. They would face huge costs if they needed to provide loaner cars for millions of owners. Of the 14 manufacturers affected by the Takata recalls, not one has offered a blanket policy of supplying loaners.

Regulators have no authority to order automakers to make loaner cars available, but Trowbridge said his agency had encouraged them to consider doing so and had encouraged car owners to ask for loaners.

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Chris Rouen of South Carolina is one such owner. He was turned down by Ford when he asked for a loaner while waiting for the recalled airbag in his Ford Mustang to be replaced.

"That's wrong," Rouen, 63, said. "That is just wrong."

Drivers like Rouen report months-long delays in getting their vehicles serviced at dealerships, for lack of replacement parts. Just under 30 percent of recalled inflaters had been fixed as of Jan. 15, according to the safety agency. That was before regulators added 5 million more to the 23 million under recall.

And it may be years before regulators have any firm understanding of the scope of the problem. The safety agency, which has barred Takata from using ammonium nitrate for new orders, has given the supplier until the end of 2018 to prove that ammonium nitrate is safe in existing airbags. And Takata has even longer, until the end of 2019, to show that inflaters with a more advanced version of the compound are safe.

"Frankly, everything's on the table with respect to any Takata inflater that uses ammonium nitrate," said Sean Kane, founder and president of Safety Research & Strategies, an auto safety consultant, who is involved in litigation against Takata.

"It takes another death or an injury to get additional vehicles recalled," he said. "Unfortunately, Joel Knight paid for that with his life."

In Rouen's case, he has been waiting for a repair since he received a recall notice in July, and he drives the car as little as possible. He filed a complaint with the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs. In August, Ford responded to the agency, explaining that the car had been deemed safe to drive until parts were available.

"As such, we will not be meeting Mr. Rouen's request for a rental vehicle until the repairs are completed," the letter said.

Ford spokesman John Cangany confirmed that policy.

Regulators have said customers should continue to drive their vehicles until parts became available, Cangany said, adding that Ford was working with its suppliers to develop replacement inflaters "as quickly as possible."

In recent months, the depth of Takata's deception has become clear. Takata has admitted that its engineers manipulated test data, and it faces a criminal inquiry into its handling of the defect.

But Takata's client automakers, and regulators, also played big roles. Honda, the automaker most affected by the recalls, learned of an airbag rupture in one of its cars as early as 2004, and alerted Takata. But the companies deemed the incident an anomaly, and did not alert regulators. Only in 2008, after three more ruptures, did Honda issue its first recall, for 4,000 cars.

During that time, regulators were slow to investigate. An initial inquiry into Honda's early recalls, in 2009, was closed after the two companies assured investigators that any quality issues were under control.

Even as the ruptures continued, automakers worked to minimize the scope of the recalls.

Only in May did Takata admit that its airbags were, in fact, defective, prompting more nationwide recalls.