100 Million More Ticking Time Bombs

by Kevin Fitzgerald with David Schumann on November 5, 2018

Takata committed their first of many lies in the spring of 2000 when their new PSAN driver inflator, PSDI, was rupturing after exposure to Honda’s validation environments. Not having the courage to admit failure to Honda, Takata removed the results of these exploding inflators from the validation report and replaced them with false, passing data. They lied to Honda and pushed the inflator into production while their chemists frantically searched for a solution and manufacturing steamed forward. In the fall of 2000, a propellant process change was made that allowed the inflator to squeak by Honda’s requirements without exploding. Takata never revealed this to Honda and never made any attempt to retrieve the defective inflators produced before the fix. Thinking they had the problem solved, they rolled the dice on the small population and never looked back. But Honda’s specification was easy and in hindsight no predictor of how the inflator would age in vehicles.

As time marched on and millions of PSAN inflators were sold to unwitting customers, the automaker’s specifications only grew more demanding. The propellant process change made in 2000 was no longer sufficient and as Takata moved to launch their second generation of PSAN inflators, post environmental ruptures became rampant. It was a cry for pause but having already strayed down the slippery slope five years earlier, the consequences of that were untenable. Takata had bet everything on PSAN and their customers were eager for the smallest and lightest inflators on the market. The lies grew and the second generation, just like the first, was launched under false pretense, leaving Takata’s chemists still scrambling for a solution.

This time it wasn’t a process change that came to the rescue. A drying agent, or desiccant (Zeolite), was added to the inflators that enabled qualification to even the most extreme specifications. It was the silver bullet and in late 2008 Takata launched their third generation of PSAN inflators called the X-Series, eight years after the first lie that had unleashed hundreds of millions of un-desiccated, ticking time bombs into the world.

A desiccant is a material that readily takes up moisture, PSAN’s ultimate Achille’s tendon, and retains it. It protects the propellant from moisture degradation driven by temperature swings. Takata’s PSAN itself is a desiccant, but Zeolite is a far superior one. Any moisture trapped in the inflator during assembly or that makes its way in through leak paths over time is bound up by the Zeolite. But the desiccant can only take up so much moisture before it saturates. When that happens, any further moisture ingress heads straight for the propellant, and the clock on the time bomb starts ticking. Desiccant extends the life of Takata’s PSAN inflators, but not their ultimate fate – it’s just a matter of time.

There are over 100 million Takata inflators with Zeolite on our roads and regulatory agencies and automakers are desperately clinging to the ‘belief’ that they are safe. By the end of 2019, the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) must make the critical call on whether to recall them. The purpose of our book, In Your Face, is to dispel the notion that they are immune from disaster. Our message is clear. Takata was a fraudulent company that never designed or manufactured safe inflators, including those desiccated with Zeolite. They are another 100 million more ticking time bombs sitting right in front of our faces that must be dealt with.

Here are the cliff notes explaining why.

What Could Go Wrong

There is no question Takata’s inflators with Zeolite are more robust than their un-desiccated counterparts and will survive longer in the field without incident. The real question is how much longer. To answer this, we must consider both their design and manufacture.

Let’s first be clear about what the inflators were designed to meet. The specifications governing them were intended to simulate approximately fifteen years in the world’s various climactic zones. We often hear statements that Takata’s desiccated inflators will be safe for the ‘life’ of the vehicle, but this is misleading. Today’s cars are lasting much longer than fifteen years. We accept that certain components like water pumps and transmissions may have to be replaced as our vehicles age, but what about an airbag that can become violently dangerous after this period? It will never prompt us for replacement, unless under recall. Even if we wanted to install a new one, it would be largely impossible to accomplish. Hear us when we say that given enough time, all Takata PSAN airbags will become dangerous. Automakers are only hoping the cars end up in a junk-yard instead of the classic-car circuit or passed down to our youngest or poorest drivers. So, while Takata’s designs that included Zeolite were good enough to meet specifications, we are adamant they are not good enough to stay in our cars forever.

Now to the manufacture of these inflators. There are so many factors that influence how long until they become dangerous: the inflator’s leak rate, the initial density of the propellant, the total booster and propellant loads, the amount of cracked or damaged propellant, and most importantly the desiccant, its total load, initial moisture content or whether it is even present. These are major factors which should have been tightly controlled by Takata’s quality systems. But therein lies the second part of our problem. Takata’s quality practices were never healthy, and worse, they deteriorated dramatically in the company’s closing years due to a global re-organization that left its Inflator Group in disarray. I know because I lived those final years in Monclova, Mexico where the inflators were manufactured, in the middle of the fire fight, trying to control things the best I could.

The main purpose of our book is to quash the idea that Takata built these inflators with the quality required, regardless of their design. A drop of sweat, a poor weld, a cut o-ring or damaged seal tape means they become dangerous at the same rate as all the rest being recalled globally. The determination of their fate will be left to lab studies by independent experts that will assume, in the absence of evidence of the contrary, that they were made correctly. Read on and you will realize they weren’t.

What Did Go Wrong

They say it takes about two to three years for a major reshuffle to have an effect on an organization, for better or worse. Takata’s global shakeup took about two and the results were disastrous. My relocation from Armada, MI, where I was responsible for inflator engineering, to the Monclova assembly plant took place in the Spring of 2013 and was precipitated by a complete meltdown of the plant’s quality system.

Takata’s brand new passenger inflator, PDP, had just exploded in an airbag lot acceptance test for GM and I was called upon to assist in the failure investigation. An early indicator of the seriousness of the quality collapse was that the airbags in question had already been shipped and installed in vehicles. Not good. A recall was unavoidable and any hope of it being an isolated incident was quickly dashed when we discovered that one of the inflator’s weld processes was out of control and had been since production started.

The inflators should never had made their way into airbags, let alone vehicles. They should have gone into the dumpster. The weld that had failed did not pass any of its critical inspection points, yet the inflator quality engineers signed off on the parts and released them into vehicles. It wasn’t just an oversight. It was intentional. With an out of control process, the plant was struggling to meet GM’s demand and instead of raising their hands and asking for help, they chose to look the other way. It was appalling and shook every one of us investigating the incident to the core.

The first order of business was to fence the recall population. This was not an aging issue. These inflators were dangerous the day they were born and had to be pulled back immediately. We stabilized the process and provided GM with the population to recall, but it was then I realized I was never going back to Michigan except to occasionally see my family. Monclova’s lines of defense had crumbled and needed to be rebuilt. There was no more important place I could be.

This is only one example of many. Zeolite may extend the life of Takata’s PSAN inflators, but it can’t stave off the inevitable accelerated by mishaps and incompetence. Takata shipped low density propellant which degrades rapidly, they never conducted inflator leak inspections correctly, their error-proofing systems were hit or miss, and they got themselves behind often only exacerbating errors and increasing the pressure to pass defective product. There is no way to guarantee the quality of every Takata inflator shipped during the tumultuous period between 2010 and 2013. Arrows got through and some will become deadly much sooner than lab studies will indicate. Are you willing to be the one with defective armor?

What Must Be Done

All Takata PSAN inflators must be recalled, desiccant or not. It’s just that simple. Every life matters. NHTSA’s continuing refusal to demand that GM recall 6.8 million of their vehicles with potentially deadly, un-desiccated Takata inflators is a clear signal this will be an uphill battle. It seems automakers would rather settle with the few that will be killed or maimed by Takata’s mistakes than absorb the cost to do this all over again. And that’s what it amounts to – a complete do-over. Another 100 million more ticking time bombs on our roads that must come off, even as we struggle to recall the first 100 million.

NHTSA has until the end of 2019 to make the call on the fate of Takata’s inflators with Zeolite desiccant. We need your help to convince them to do what is right, but at a minimum these two things must happen.

1. Orbital ATK and Cornerstone Research must be not be allowed to participate in the survivability assessment of Takata inflators with Zeolite desiccant. Their amateurish work in support of General Motors GMT-900 Takata Airbag Petitions of Inconsequentiality is disqualifying. Our arguments supporting that position can be found here and here.
2. NHTSA must immediately release a list of every vehicle containing Takata inflators with Zeolite desiccant. If they won’t recall these inflators which is looking more and more likely, then we the consumers deserve to know if we are driving around with one in our face.

The Remaining 100 Million

The seven figures that follow present all of Takata’s inflators containing Zeolite and highlight the factors that will influence their degradation rates. Make no mistake, the desiccant will eventually saturate. The time that takes and how fast the clock ticks afterwards will depend on the robustness of the elements depicted.