A quest to save a few dollars per air bag led to Takata’s crisis
In the late 1990s, General Motors got an unexpected and enticing offer. A little-known Japanese supplier, Takata, had designed a much cheaper automotive air bag.
GM turned to its air bag 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 GM account at the time.
But when Autoliv’s scientists studied the Takata air bag, they found that it relied on a dangerously volatile compound in its inflater, a critical part that causes the air bag 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 air bags have been installed in cars in the U.S. by General Motors and 16 other automakers.
Details of GM’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 air bag compromised a key 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,” Rink said. Her team was told that the Takata inflaters were as much as 30 percent cheaper per module, she added. “That set off a big panic on how to compete.”
Tom Wilkinson, a spokesman for GM, which was reorganized as a new company after declaring bankruptcy in 2009, said the Takata discussions “occurred two decades ago between old GM and a supplier,” and therefore it was “not appropriate for us to comment.”
“We knew that GM was getting low-cost inflaters from others,” said Chris Hock, a former member of Taylor’s team who left Autoliv in April. “That was a dangerous path.”
Even with the record recall, deadly accidents and research critical of ammonium nitrate, Takata continues to make air bags with the compound — and automakers continue to buy them. The air bags appear in the 2016 models of seven automakers, and they are being installed in cars as replacement air bags for those being recalled.
Takata said in a statement that it had taken steps to protect the ammonium nitrate it uses against temperature changes, which along with moisture are the main factors contributing to its volatility. The manufacturer said it was also studying, along with safety regulators and some automakers, inflaters with a drying agent “to better understand and quantify their service life.”