Airbags: Takata’s Not the Only Story

It was supposed to be a safety device.

During a discussion in the mid-Seventies about why auto manufacturers hadn’t successfully made vehicles safer, a Ford engineer made an off-the-cuff and possibly insensitive statement. When asked how to make the ultimate safe automobile, his answer was to install a claymore mine under the driver’s seat, wired to explode if that vehicle were in any accident. The engineer’s logic? Simple: If you knew that any accident you were involved in would kill you, no matter how slow or fast or whose fault it was, everyone would start driving more sanely. He was roundly trashed at the time, but his reasoning was inherently solid: If we want to drastically reduce highway fatalities in America, we’ll have to change or challenge human nature.

Who could have guessed that 40 years later, a device very similar to that engineer’s dream device would have been installed in possibly over 100 million automobiles sold in America? It’s the Takata airbag inflators. For propellant they use ammonium nitrate, which, according to NHTSA and other independent studies, in regions with high heat and humidity can become unstable over time. Then, in an accident, the unstable propellant can discharge with so much force that it can send shrapnel into the vehicle’s occupants, potentially causing death. Currently more than 28 million vehicles are under recall (only 7 million have been updated), and the threat exists of an expanded recall that would encompass another 85 million vehicles. Yet over 15 years, the percentage of these airbags that have failed is extremely small.

Now, if I suggested to you that any airbag is more likely to take your life in an accident than save it, how would you respond to that statistic?

This came about while I was researching the story of Patricia Mincey, who tragically died this April 11 as a result of an airbag deployment that happened last June. Her family blames only the old Takata airbag inflator in her 2001 Honda Civic, but the full story may reveal a larger problem with airbags in general. Here are the details as reported by Jacksonville’s Florida Times-Union on February 2, 2015.

Ms. Mincey, 76, was driving her 14-year-old Civic and ran a red light while going more than 30 miles an hour, striking another motorist traveling at 20 mph. According to this story, her airbags did not deploy at first, but then exploded — with a force that literally shattered her spine, leaving her a quadriplegic.

This accident brings up several questions whose answers are needed to determine the problem. Nobody reporting on Ms. Mincey’s tragic accident has addressed them: First, how tall was she and how close was she to the steering wheel while driving? (Accident photos show she needed a cushion to drive.) Why do they believe the airbag did not deploy immediately? Did she suffer from osteoporosis? The reason I ask these questions is that it is quite possible, indeed probable, that a woman in her seventies of short stature and porous bones would be badly injured, possibly even fatally, by a “correctly functioning” airbag deploying even in the most moderate of accidents.

It’s time to remind everyone that the first officially reported death from an airbag in the U.S. came in 1990, not even two years after Lee Iacocca and Chrysler convinced us that the time had come to install airbags in cars across the country.

Of course, the automakers knew that airbags were not the all-inclusive automotive safety device that the government and safety advocates were demanding. Ford had built test cars with airbags in 1971. GM built an experimental fleet of airbag-equipped vehicles in 1973, then made them an option in large Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Cadillacs in 1974. And soon after that, GM found that seven of those vehicles still ended up in fatal crashes — and at least one death was directly attributed to the airbag’s deploying.

The meaning of this was not lost on the automaker: That very limited number of vehicles had a high rate of fatalities, statistically suggesting that airbags were not helping in high-speed accidents. But it was the death caused by the airbag that bothered GM most.

Twenty-five years later, a University of Georgia Professor of Statistics would endorse GM’s findings and feelings.

The stage was set for the 1980 showdown with Joan Claybrook’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, when she claimed airbags in cars would have saved 30,000 lives in the past decade had they been installed. For the record, Claybrook was wrong and way off. According to NHTSA, by 1999 and over a decade after airbags were introduced, only 4,600 lives had been saved. Within a year that number would be changed to read that airbags had saved 6,377 lives — out of 3.3 million deployments.

The other figure that few wanted to talk about was the 175 people whom airbags had killed in low-speed deployments. (By 2002 NHTSA reported 239 fatalities from airbag deployments.)

GM and other car companies had warned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that airbags could cause and had caused fatalities for some classifications of drivers, and that airbags couldn’t control their own deployment force — which could endanger shorter drivers and children, particularly in a vehicle’s front seats. The government ignored that warning, treating it as Detroit simply digging in their heels rather than creating safer cars. But by the early Nineties, as the media was airing reports of airbags killing occupants in low-speed accidents, NHTSA was holding closed-door sessions on how to deal with the fact that Detroit had been right.

The road to airbags had been a long one. John Hetrick had filed the patent for his airbag design on August 18, 1953, but it was impractical: No triggering device existed that could deploy an airbag fast enough to do any good in an accident. That requirement was filled by the U.S. military in the Sixties, when detonation devices for bombs were improved. The military shared their improved detonation device with Detroit almost immediately; but, sadly, Hetrick never made a penny off his patent: It expired in 1971, just as automakers built their first fleets of vehicles with airbags.

In 1984 a law was passed mandating supplemental restraint systems in automobiles, which in some vehicles gave us motorized upper shoulder belts. In 1988 a Chrysler ad campaign announced that the company had seen the light and would start installing airbags in its product lines. Then stories of adult drivers and kids being killed by airbags in extremely low-speed accidents were made public. NHTSA farmed out a study on the dangers of airbags to the University of North Carolina, and the final report was not reassuring. But, since the government no longer apologizes for its mistakes, the public was simply given the next bit of positive news.

By the late Nineties we would mandate smarter airbags, which would be less damaging to smaller individuals in the front. At the same time and with much less fanfare, the new airbags no longer deployed if one struck a mall parking barrier going 5 mph. Now more complex algorithms would force deployment at speeds around 14 mph in a fixed-barrier collision, or double that in a collision with a parked car of a similar size. Make no mistake, it would have been this second and supposedly smarter airbag system that Honda would have installed in Ms. Mincey’s 2001 Honda Civic.

Even here hard facts were out in the open, showing that airbags were at best little more than their legitimate name: a supplemental restraint system. NHTSA had long used a scoring system to show the likelihood of injury or fatality during their vehicle crash testing. This older and far more honest NHTSA test would rank vehicles based on a scoring system in which anything under 800 meant you would walk away from an accident without injury, where 801 to 1,000 meant injuries from minor to major and over 1,000 would be considered a fatality. In the year before a driver’s side airbag was introduced in the 1992 Honda Accord, that vehicle scored only a 528 in the government’s crash test. Well inside the non-injury area. The next year, with an airbag installed, that same Accord scored 518. A minimal improvement in a vehicle already considered exceptional. As a comparison, those same tests scored the full-sized 1992 Lincoln Town Car at over 800.

Only now, after the media’s reporting on airbag fatalities, was a new label affixed over the driver’s side visor, warning everyone that children were always to be put in the back seat because airbags could kill them if they were up front. And yet the public still thought of airbags as a safety device. Even more shocking, after all the promises that this second generation of airbag would resolve, or mitigate the inherent problems of airbags, you could still petition the government to have your vehicle’s airbags deactivated. (You still can today at safercar.gov.)

The rules for that disconnection have changed only slightly: If you have kids that have to ride in front, either from no back seat or from a medical condition, or a rider of small stature, preferably under 4’ 9”, deactivating your vehicle’s airbags can be approved. Just don’t expect any new car dealer to do so as a result of our love of litigation from auto accidents.

A cost analysis of airbags vs. lives saved, done by the guys who brought us Freakonomics, was based on NHTSA’s data. They posted on their blog that, using a figure of $25 per seatbelt installed per year, based on every life they saved in a car wreck, we spend $30,000 on seatbelts for every life saved. However, airbags came in at $1.8 million per life saved. And here Freakonomics may have missed an important financial factor: How many cars and trucks do insurance companies just write off as totaled every day after moderate or smaller accidents, simply because replacing every airbag that deployed inside the vehicle costs so much?

One study changed everything — and yet absolutely no one read it. It was published in Chance magazine and on www.phys.org, which is a popular science news website for almost 2 million scientists, researchers and engineers. This study on airbags was done in 2005 by Mary C. Meyer, then a Professor of Statistics at the University of Georgia.

Meyer started thinking about the 238 airbag-caused deaths from 1990 through 2002 that NHTSA admitted to. (Up from 175 in 1999) As she noted, “They all occurred at very low speeds, with injuries that could not have been caused by anything else.” The statistical logic she immediately grasped was that the government was cherry-picking data in order to show the lowest possible number of fatalities from airbags. Because if airbags kill at extremely low speeds, then situations would exist where those devices could also kill in much higher-speed accidents, too. Only the government seemed to have omitted that possibility from their published data.

Meyer’s final paper showed that wearing one’s seatbelt reduces the odds of death in an automobile accident by 67 percent, across any given speed category. Airbags, however, showed to make no statistical difference whatsoever in auto fatalities, with one exception: An unbelted front seat occupant in a low-speed accident — and here the odds of dying because of the airbag are more than four times higher than if the car did not have that so-called safety device.

Meyer’s analogy for how this is intentional on the government’s part and misunderstood by the public compared it to cancer and radiation treatments: “If you look at people who have some types of cancer, you will see that those who get radiation treatment have a better chance of surviving than those who don’t. However, radiation is inherently dangerous and could actually cause cancer. If you give everyone radiation treatments, whether they have cancer or not, then you will probably find an increased risk of death in the general population.”

Over the years while I was still in the auto industry, a handful of customers would come into the dealership and regale me with how an airbag saved their lives. Some would have burns on their thighs or arms, (many airbags originally used sodium azide, a rocket fuel, as their propellant); others had gauze covering where the deploying airbag had skinned them. One had a broken wrist. We’d go back to the body shop to look at their damaged car. And I would have to tell them that, even if they’d had no airbag and hadn’t been wearing their seatbelts, they would have walked away from the wreck they’d had.

The public has been taught that if an airbag went off, it saved you. That is demonstrably not true. Again, using NHTSA’s own data, in 3.3 million airbag deployments only 6,377 lives were saved. And as Professor Meyer pointed out, the lives taken by airbags are not statistically counted or even considered.

In spite of this, the modern automobile is the pinnacle of vehicle safety. Crumple zones, created by Mercedes-Benz in the late Seventies and designed to absorb the impact of an accident, dramatically lowered the number of lives lost in accidents. So did replacing metal dashboards with a softer, cushiony material. As America buckled up, the biggest number of lives were saved; and anti-lock braking systems, which kept drivers from losing control of their vehicles because of speed, poor weather conditions or both, either helped many drivers completely avoid accidents or greatly reduced their speed before the collision, making any accident more survivable.

Still, this entire story haunts me. Even I thought most of their better-known problems went away with the second generation of “smarter” airbags. Yet in reading about the tragedy of Ms. Mincey and her 14-year-old Honda, I realized for some little has improved. After all, her Honda had post-1998 regulation airbags installed.

The media immediately homed in on the airbag inflator’s manufacturer, Takata, and completely missed the potentially far greater story of all airbags. Smaller or more fragile drivers, possibly elderly women with osteoporosis, believe the airbag will save them in an accident. In fact, Ms. Mincey’s cautionary tale suggests the opposite.

According to Professor Meyer’s statistics, airbags can do more harm than good. But verifiable facts alone won’t make anyone change direction.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Airbags: Takata’s Not the Only Story."