'Largest Recall In American History': Takata To Recall Nearly 70 Million Airbags (nbcnews.com) 123
An anonymous reader writes: Federal regulators are ordering Japanese supplier Takata to recall as many as 40 million additional airbags linked to a defect already blamed for at least 11 deaths, bringing the total number of faulty airbags in the U.S. to 69 million. Previously, the recall involved about 24 million vehicles sold in the U.S. over roughly the last decade, with 14 manufacturers impacted. With the latest recall, almost every other major carmaker will now be pulled. "This is the largest recall in American history," National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind told reporters on Wednesday. Initial estimates said 35-40 million airbags were to be recalled. And because some vehicles use more than one Takata airbag, the total number of vehicles will likely be smaller. Now it's considered highly likely that the total number of cars, trucks and crossovers will now top the 50 million mark, and as many as a quarter of all vehicles on U.S. roads could be covered. The NHTSA has reported that just over 8 million vehicles had been fixed as of April 22. The airbags have so far been tied to at least 10 U.S. deaths and more than 100 injuries -- two more fatalities in Malaysia were confirmed Wednesday. "The exploding airbags can send shrapnel into the faces and necks of victims, leaving them looking as if they had been shot or stabbed," according to Fox 59.
Feature, Not Bug (Score:3)
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>a LOT more carefully!
>SHRAPNEL in the FACE!
>do a study on that!
You seem a little excitable. Do you need your Xanax?
Re:Feature, Not Bug (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet if you get one of those recall notifications, you drive a LOT more carefully!
I suspect you're correct. I drove an older Cadillac, with big chrome bumpers, until 15 years ago. And nothing newer before that. I was surprised how much differently people drove around me after I had a modern car. I guess no one wanted to pull out in front of a car that weighed twice as much as theirs and had a huge chrome and steel bumper between me and them.
Re:Feature, Not Bug (Score:5, Funny)
So you are saying that you've now gotten out of the Pimping game?
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No, they just assume somebody in a big, old, heavy car is going to be limited to slower reactions. That big old heavy steel car has lower crash survivability than most of the new little light things. Because of crumple zones. Big old heavy cars mostly crumple inside the passenger compartment when they crash.
It is just plain unpleasant to drive near a slow-reacting, heavy vehicle. Even if your technical driving skills are good, you'll be a step behind everybody else.
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It depends on they type of crash. I had a friend who was driving a 65 T-bird when a driver going the other way fell asleep and crossed over and hit him head on. The other car was a Chevy Beretta, which had a 5 star head on rating crash at the time. My friend was fine, other than being shaken up. The other driver was pronounced dead at the scene.
I hit deer on four separate occasions in that Cadillac. The worst thing that happened was that I had to pull some fur out of the grill. Another friend of mine was
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It depends on they type of crash. I had a friend who was driving a 65 T-bird when a driver going the other way fell asleep and crossed over and hit him head on. The other car was a Chevy Beretta, which had a 5 star head on rating crash at the time. My friend was fine, other than being shaken up. The other driver was pronounced dead at the scene.
While the dynamics of all crashes are different, I''m just going to drop this [youtube.com] right here. Moderns vehicles are designed from the ground up to sacrifice the car for the safety of the passengers. Older vehicles were not.
Your new car will be totaled in any significant accident, while your land yacht may just need a hammer, some bondo, and some paint, but the humans in a modern vehicle are much, much safer.
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Less the vehicle than the drivers, though. A slow driver in a quick vehicle is much slower than a quick driver in a slow vehicle.
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No, they just assume somebody in a big, old, heavy car is going to be limited to slower reactions. That big old heavy steel car has lower crash survivability than most of the new little light things.
I don't think the drivers of the new light things were worried about the GP's survivability. They were more concerned with their own.
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It is just plain unpleasant to drive near a slow-reacting, heavy vehicle. Even if your technical driving skills are good, you'll be a step behind everybody else.
Most vehicles are slow-reacting regardless of mass or driving ability. That's intentional. They don't want you to twitch your foot or arm a little bit and kill yourself.
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Absolutely false. Really, really weird place to encounter relativism. Moral relativism is stupid enough, but physics relativism? It means something different. It doesn't mean, gosh, the cars all weigh the same.
This has got to be one of your stupidest comments ever, sorry. I'm gonna stick with, old heavy cars change speed and direction much slower than than newer lighter cars. Duh. There is no argument possible there, sorry. Pretty basic stuff.
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Absolutely false.
It is absolutely not false. Most vehicles have high steering ratios and long pedal travels specifically to stop you from accidentally murdering yourself or others.
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I wish that effect would work with my Tundra:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(looks just like the picture, but black)
It seems like my truck has a malfunctioning cloaking device the way people pull out or turn left right in front of me. You would think they have a death wish.
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I can't be bothered to look it up but I think the Freakonomics guys did something like that.
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Are they the ones that said replacing the steering-wheel airbag with a big shiny steel spike could cause a dramatic drop in road accidents?
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Yeah pretty sure that was it. It was a long time ago that I read it though. I've also got in my head Jeremy Clarkson saying something similar so I could have them blended.
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It was an experiment with ABS and taxi drivers. When they gave ABS systems to the test group, their driving became more aggressive to bring the overall risk of driving in line with their personal risk thresholds.
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*Makes mental note: no more driving 30 over the speed limit, back it down a tad, say -- around 20 over.
Check!
Re: driving a LOT more carefully (Score:1)
this is the inverse (contrapositive? i didn't pay that much attention in logic101;-) of one of stan mott's cartoons in car&driver waaaay back when...in addition to his brilliant cyclops series (recently introduced as the tata nano https://www.carthrottle.com/po... [carthrottle.com] ;-) he mocked safety regs with a cartoon of ppl driving around in federal safety tanks ramming anyone who got in their way;-}
http://www.deansgarage.com/201... [deansgarage.com]
http://www.darkroastedblend.co... [darkroastedblend.com]
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Natural selection; she rear ended someone else and brought this onto herself.
Speaking of natural selection: Comments like these help ensure you'll never reproduce.
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Fuck you. Go tell that to the parents of the 17 year old girl that died because of a fairly minor collision and an exploding Takata air bag. Or tell that to the man who tried to save her life..
Yes. GP's post is suddenly less insightful because it wasn't prequalified with a sensitive prologue like, "Oh, the humanity!"
There are many places on the internet that exhibit that level of compassion... you're likely only temporarily in the wrong forum for that.
Airbags: (Score:2)
You probably won't die but you're definitely getting hurt.
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Where can I get one of those dummy (non functional) airbags that scammer body shops were installing in cars? I'd much rather just depend on by seat belt. In fact, all but one of my cars predate airbags by decades.
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Just remove
The airbag assembly includes the finished cover. That would leave a hole.
or unplug
That will result in an error code and perhaps failing an inspection. There might be dummy plugs available to fool the self test.
not a large fraction of problems (Score:5, Informative)
I have a vehicle affected by this and was trying to gauge the appropriate level of alarm. The best info I can find [consumerreports.org] indicates that there have been 88 "rupture" events out of 1.2 million deployment as of last year. So I do not think it makes sense to worry too much at this point, as those are pretty unlikely events, even if it is really more like 1000 bad explosive deployments so far. There do seem to be some concerns about high humidity areas and strong temperature variation locations being more likely to have issues and originally the recalls were focused on the southern US and other warm areas, though now the plan is to replace them all.
Much of the coverage has been alarmist- "your car is going to kill you!" so it was good to see that the fraction is low. But it was very troubling to read about how evasive and duplicitous the manufacturer has been as the problems should have been detected and addressed much earlier.
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Why schedule this free maintenance ASAP and not worry at all about being killed or having your face disfigured for no good reason?
If you're going to worry about a minuscule chance of harm, then you'll find something else to worry about even if you conduct the sacred rituals of the Recall. This is why we invented invisible sky gods. That way when something bad happens, it at least happens for a reason, no doubt good, and you no longer have to worry about it.
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Yep, it has taken years before they fixed my wifes car, but they still seem to have airbags to put into new cars.
Re:not a large fraction of problems (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking in all honesty, this is the top priority for our division. We want to replace 100% of the Takata inflators. Other OEs should be taking it just as serious.
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I am interested. The only communication I have received from Honda is that I need new airbags, but they are waiting on more inventory to arrive. I would really appreciate not wondering whether my wife is going to be perforated by flying plastic when she drives to and from work.
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Honda may not charge me but I loose the opportunity to make money that day (My car is required to make money) so I'm a little miffed.
Your being alive and in good health is also required for you to make money.
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Also, it is NOT free. Honda may not charge me but I loose the opportunity to make money that day
So borrow a car for a shift from a friend/relative? Or take it somewhere that offers courtesy vehicles; its not like its an emergency so you can schedule around a courtesy car being available.
Worst case, rent a car... that will actually cost you some money, but presumably less than working that day will.
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So Honda employee, see what taking the lowest tender really buys you and the rest of us. For winners to win in capitalism there must be losers but those losers don't just harm themselves they create victims, millions upon millions of victims in one form or another. Endless failure for ever is what the lowest tender provides.
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I have a vehicle affected by this and was trying to gauge the appropriate level of alarm. The best info I can find indicates that there have been 88 "rupture" events out of 1.2 million deployment as of last year.
There do seem to be some concerns about high humidity areas and strong temperature variation locations being more likely to have issues and originally the recalls were focused on the southern US and other warm areas, though now the plan is to replace them all.
Based on what I remember from a few hours of hearings Takata nor anyone else simply has that kind of stock on hand to replace what needed to be replaced. Staggered notifications were triage wanting to avoid situation where people would receive a recall notice and dealership being unable to source replacement inflators.
The consumer reports article is quite good however my understanding from at least circa 2015 Takata really didn't have any definitive handle on root cause of the failures. While there is a
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Not hen's teeth (Score:2)
downright cromulent.
Takata vs Godzilla (Score:2)
It's a good thing they came out (Score:2)
I'm glad they did not hide this fact from consumers, lest it blow up in their face.
Is this recall economically justified? (Score:3, Insightful)
For the logical behind this process here is Milton Friedman explaining it to a college student:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re:Is this recall economically justified? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's an unpopular notion but various U.S. Government agencies are required to place a dollar value on a human life in order to make reasonable economic and policy decisions. The exact value of a human life varies by agency but the range is currently about $4M to $9M. With only 11 lives lost from to this airbag fault and a reported 70 million airbags affected by this recall, each likely costly hundreds each to replace, is this recall justified?
I don't think this premise may be accurate because not enough is known about failure mechanism. In any calculation you would also have to consider chance of outliers becoming more common as components age.
The correlation with salt spray in costal areas and high humidity is troubling.
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Are you ribbing me?
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If capitalists are guilty of not recognizing the "true costs" of capitalism then anti-capitalists are even more guilty of not recognizing the "true costs" of not having capitalism, such as the democratization of wealth and prosperity.
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It's actually kind of jaw-dropping listening to Friedman ramble on with his non sequiturs about safe cars causing people to starve to death.
That's why Friedman is an economist and you are an idiot. That there are tremendous costs to making things too safe is not in doubt. This story is a prime example. They can only point to a handful of deaths and about an order of magnitude more injuries. Successful deployments to excessive injury deployments are about 10,000 to 1.
Meanwhile poverty kills many orders of magnitude more than that. A society, which is willing to burn $10 billion or more dollars just to save about a dozen lives every four years
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And I find it deeply ironic that you babble about non sequiturs while simultaneously using the completely irrelevant example of Apple. Psychological projection at its finest.
How about when I get into a car that may or may not have an airbag made by this company that may or may not be defective?
How about you don't lose your shit ove
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But it's wasted if you use that money to make airbags that don't shoot little bits of metal into your face, or you use that money to make cars that don't burn when rear-ended? It seems that the argument is trying to be something like the broken glass fallacy, except the moral of your and Friedman's story seems to be "whoopsie, I broke the glass, but I'll be damned if that glazier's getting a cent. You're going to have to leave the glass broken or people are going to starve for no discernible reason!!1!"
Already something like 10,000 to 1 airbags are of the type that don't shoot metal or whatever into your face. They shoot airbag.
If they are both designed to fire little bits of metal into your face
Airbags aren't designed to do that. And some shot gun shells will take your head off, which isn't a problem with airbags no matter what the press is.
Once the design flaw is known to exist, continuing to use that design is intentional.
It's not much of a design flaw let us note. And we still are left with the observation that it is most likely killing more people than it saves through the squandering of resources on frivolous, vast scale theater, not even counting th
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I own s car they is affected by this recall (Score:4, Informative)
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same here.
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So 70 million drivers in America are about to be a lot more careful on the road then?
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1) They cannot repair the vehicle now, they do not have the parts. 2) Any reasonably equivalent vehicle that they *MIGHT* have would likely also be impacted by the recall. 3) That could leave us without a car entirely... which we need, and given a choice, I would muc
They said.. (Score:2)
They said "seat belts would save lives, they did but you had to be responsible to use them." Before that they said "seat belts are unnecessary and presume that our cars are unsafe."
Then they said "airbags would save lives and they did but unless you were a kid in the passenger seat."
Then they said "we've fixed that so we'll just disable the airbag if you're not heavy enough. Put your kids in the back just be sure they said."
Then they said "these airbags can explode and deploy shrapnel they said, so we're
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Sucks if you were one of the 10 or so deaths from what would have been a minor accident, but it's similar to vaccines. Millions of lives have been saved from vaccines, but if you are one of the rare people who has a serious reaction to a vaccine.
Citation needed.
Nobody has ever died from a vaccine. A couple of coincidental deaths that happened close to the time that someone received a vaccine do not prove that the vaccine caused the death.
Please stop spreading FUD.
See http://www.snopes.com/politics... [snopes.com]
What about recalling... (Score:2, Insightful)
What about recalling guns? Save more lives... ;-)
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What about recalling guns? Save more lives... ;-)
To use a car analogy hey, it's slashdot AND it's a thread about cars) to what you're suggesting above, "someone ran a jeep cherokee into a crowd of people. Let's get all these cars off the road."
To the point you're actually trying to make, though, I'll say this: there's a firearm for every person in the US. Banning them will never achieve what gun control advocates say it will, it will only disarm the law abiding while criminals will have access to them for centuries to come.
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Like what happened in Australia and the UK, ay, oh wait...
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Two islands with a much, much lower population and not anywhere near the amount of actual firearms manufacturers located on the same soil. Gather them up, don't let any more in on the boats (or planes). Won't work so well here.
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A little history is helpful here (Score:5, Insightful)
When the auto industry came up with the airbag decades ago, while doing the sorts of research they used to do lots of (remember gas turbine cars?) they decided not to put them into cars.
In the era of Nader's Raiders, when Ralph Nader was grooming a whole generation of lawyers to weaponize the courts for social justice and using the press to assert that all businesses did the things they do for nefarious purposes, the congress was grilling auto execs (it was great PR for politicians) and began to demand airbags. This was also the era when CBS was getting monster ratings with their ambush journalism on 60 Minutes (which was very different from the modern show). The idea that evil greedy car company bosses were penny-pinching on airbags and people were dying needlessly in car crashes played really well in political circles. This was there era of "unsafe at any speed" which pioneered Michael Moore style activism and scared the public away from a perfectly fine car, the Corvair. The Corvair, (I have experience with several of them) was great little rear-engined car that performed well and was a nice quiet ride, thanks to the air-cooled rear-engine configuration, but could handle a bit differently in some situations due to the engine weight being at the back (like if driven recklessly through curves on slick roads, particularly if nothing was stored under the front hood). Rather than saying "these are a different, innovative design that people familiar with them can drive safely" (which used to be the presumption for all tech products), the idea became: if any innovation can be dangerous in the hands of a reckless idiot, it must be bad and driven from the marketplace.
The federal government began to demand airbags and in the hearings that were held, the auto execs explained why they decided not to put these devices into cars. Their experiments had shown that the bags were more likely to kill women and children than to save them, and that with the tech available at that time they were not even certain that the number of adult males who would be saved would outnumber the ones who would be killed by them, and furthermore by adding these devices they would become legally liable for the deaths caused. The government ended up ordering the adoption of airbags anyway.
After airbags began to be used in cars (years after they were originally invented, and after much better tech had come along to sense collisions and trigger the bags) the car companies were attacked again both in the political real and in the courts, because women and children were being disproportionally killed by airbags (doh!). The auto execs were portrayed as greedy and heartless and incompetent for making systems that were not sufficiently good to adapt to these typically smaller/lighter people, by politicians and lawyers who themselves had never created ANYTHING. As technology advanced, the auto industry was able to add sensors to vehicles to adapt the airbag deployments to the mass of the persons in each seat (something that was essentially impossible early-on). Now they are taking a big hit on the Takata airbags over reliability and injuries and deaths stemming from design/manufacturing issues which were also one of the reasons manufacturers originally opposed airbags (additional liability from adding critical and dangerous extras to the car which could be deadly if imperfectly designed/built).
At every turn in the story, the original position of the auto company execs who resisted putting the things in cars, has been validated. The politicians, lawyers, and journalists who built careers on both sides of the issue (first claiming the car companies were evil for NOT including the bags, and then attacking them for harming people with the bags) never actually did anything productive and difficult themselves. The air bag is a good idea and was a good idea when the auto companies came up with it long ago, but this legal/political/journalistic whiplash is actually a negative thing - it creates an environment where companies are
Re: A little history is helpful here (Score:1)
Where oh where are my mod points when I need them!
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Pretty much the first result when searching airbag efficacy.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/153/3/219.full
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"significant vocal percentage of Americans are fucking morons"
hey, no trump discussion here;-)
It's all a matter of labeling. (Score:2)
Instead of putting "AIRBAG" or "SRS" on the steering wheel, they should instead label it "FRONT TOWARD ENEMY."
Federal Pacific (Score:2)
The Miracle of the Marketplace, indeed.
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It will be automakers problem to replace airbags anyway. It is highly unlikely an automaker would be forced into bankruptcy because of airbag replacement on some of their cars.
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