This seems to come up concerningly often enough in the airbag industry...
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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It’s really a non issue. Good on the regulators for pushing for it, but over 14-15 years across the entirety of US and Canada there have only been 7 possible injuries and 2 possible deaths from it.
Across hundreds of millions of vehicles that have had these in them since 2009.
Combine that with the odds that you're going to survive a car accident because of the airbag alone.
With those kind of numbers, we would call a death from airbag a "freak accident". Regulators really don't need to waste time on this when there are so many bigger and better targets to pour resources into.
I hate it when the tin-foil-hatters end up being coincidentally right about something.
I mean, air bag inflator are pretty much just explosive devices to begin with, just ones that are calibrated to only make enough of an explosion to fill up an air bag and no more. I can't think of a more obvious failure mode than exploding too much except for not exploding enough.
The issue isn’t exploding too much, it’s that on a very small sample of them, some of the welding could block the exhaust port that goes to fill the airbag up.
So without that exhaust, the thing just explodes like a small bomb rather than filling the airbag.
The actual number is ridiculously tiny though. They only have less than 10 possible cases across hundreds of millions of airbags over 14 years across the US and Canada.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. government is taking a big step toward forcing a defiant Tennessee company to recall 52 million air bag inflators that could explode, hurl shrapnel and injure or kill people.
The company maintains that no safety defect exists, that NHTSA’s demand is based on a hypothesis rather than technical conclusions, and that the agency has no authority to order a parts manufacturer to announce recalls.
NHTSA contends that byproducts from welding during manufacturing can clog a vent inside the inflator canister that is designed to let gas escape to quickly fill air bags in a crash.
ARC, acquired in 2016 by Chinese real estate developer Yinyi Group, has said in letters to the government that it can’t state for sure whether its inflators might rupture again.
ARC said that during NHTSA’s eight-year investigation into the inflators, air bag makers, automakers and the government have been informed of any unexplained ruptures on the roads.
Steve Polich, a Michigan attorney representing Beaudoin’s family in a lawsuit against ARC, General Motors and air bag assembly maker Toyoda Gosei, welcomed NHTSA’s finding and said in an email that it supports his case.
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Can't have shit in detroit
Man 2e need air pockets not claimores