Once Again: If People Are Dying Because of Your Product, Admit It, and Fix It. Fast.

Most of us hate publicly admitting our failings. We're good at not admitting them to ourselves, and we're really good at hiding them from those whose opinions matter to us.

In this case, corporations are people too!

I've written before (here and here) about the problems with Takata airbags. The story -- which is now "resolving" itself with the largest automotive recall in U.S. history (32 million vehicles) -- continues to unfold. In an article in today's New York Times, reporters Hiroko Tabuchi and Danielle Ivory write that "Takata halted global safety audits at its manufacturing plants in 2009, a year after Honda had started recalling a small number of cars to replace the airbags."

Let's think about that for a moment: Your product has been identified as having a potentially life-threatening problem (to date, eight deaths have been attributed to the defect). One of your customers has started recalling vehicles in which your product was installed. And this is the moment when you choose to stop doing safety audits???

Wow.

This was only one of several "serious safety lapses", according to a report released yesterday by Senator Bill Nelson (D - FL). According to the article, "a Takata executive is among those scheduled to testify before the [Senate] committee [on Commerce, Science, and Transportation] about its defective airbags."

I'm looking forward to reading that testimony.

Takata has already claimed that the report is inaccurate, based on out-of-context reading of corporate emails:

The company said that it had conducted regular reviews of product quality and safety and that the halted global audits referred to in the report related only to worker safety, not product quality or safety.

I feel much better, don't you?

In a previous post, I shared reports that Takata had conducted secret tests, using airbags from junked cars, as much as a decade ago, and came up with some alarming results. More alarming, however, was that those results didn't prod the company to take action. Something similar appears to have happened with the global safety audits:

When Takata eventually restarted the safety audits in 2011, auditors identified quality lapses in the plants [in Monclova, Mexico, and Moses Lake, WA], the report said, citing internal company emails....

But those findings were not shared with Takata's headquarters in Tokyo, the report said, citing internal emails from Takata's safety director at the time.

Then, when the safety director returned to the plant months later to conduct a follow-up audit, employees appeared to scramble to create the appearance of a safety committee within the plant. 

It just gets worse.

We do know that the propellant, which is intended to help the airbag inflate very fast in the event of a crash, can degrade. When that happens, the airbag may inflate with too much force, rupturing the steel canisters that hold the propellant and spewing metal shards into the passenger compartment. But it's not altogether clear what causes the propellant to degrade (moisture and high temperatures help, but not all propellant exposed to those conditions degrades in the same way). Nor is it completely clear what causes the inflater ruptures. So it's likely that "replacement airbags being fitted in recalled cars [will] ...eventually have to be recalled."

And you wonder why I like regulators with teeth?