Former Takata Engineer Exposes Airbag Scandal

Former Takata Engineer Exposes Airbag Scandal

Now this, this is what we’re looking for. So we’re gonna go on with NHTSA’s website and we’re gonna put in the VIN number. Vehicle with defective airbag is involved in a crash where the front passenger airbag is designed to deploy. It is possible that the inflator housing may rupture, which may cause the risk of an injury to the front seat occupant. Okay. That should be no problem. We have the tools for this. I can do these in like a few minutes. It should pop right out now. And I can tell this is the ammonium nitrate based design. So that could be taken out and put into another car. NHTSA doesn’t want robots searching for this information. It seems like a great thing for robots to do, in my opinion. This has a recall. We probably should just take this one out as our duty to society. There are two types of Takata inflators, those that are recalled and those that will be. I got all the hair back. You’re wondering, am I going to put them in cars? Yeah,
absolutely not. I’m not going to put them in cars. It makes you want to say, like, no, believe it or not, I’m going to burn these. There’s something that can explode and kill you in your car. If one of these exploded a foot or two from your face, there’s a significant chance it could kill you. People do not understand what they are dealing with here. This is the device that’s supposed to prevent you from being injured, yet it’s what’s killing people. Somebody could die today because of this. This morning, another person now dead because of faulty Takata airbags. Another highway death caused by a defective airbag by the victim’s manufacturer. Starting in 3, 2, 1. I was graduating from Auburn University with a degree in mechanical engineering, and I was interviewing for jobs, and one of those jobs was at Takata in LaGrange, Georgia. When I got there and I interviewed, I was impressed. It looked exciting. I liked the idea of working in the auto industry, interfacing with all the car companies, BMW, Honda, GM, Toyota, Ford. I was excited about the prospects of working there. I was in the design group responsible for Inflator products. It was really an exciting place to work. I realized that cars are not really designed by car companies. They’re designed piece by piece by the suppliers that meet the specs that the car companies give them. Basically, an airbag is supposed to generate gas in a very short amount of time to fill a bag. A crash usually happens quickly. You don’t have much time to get a bag in place. Inflators are put through environments. They’re tested. Car companies had their different requirements. And the number of inflators you had to test and the specific test plan. When one specific test was going on to emulate a… A truck fire or something. We heard a loud explosion. I would estimate. 30 seconds later, one of the technicians runs up to our second floor office. I never will forget. She flings the door open. She said, he’s been hurt. An inflator had blown up. You could hear it all the way in our building. It jolted out of the fire. And this technician believed that because it was laying on the ground, it was okay. It wasn’t in the fire. He’d waited some time. I don’t know how long. It was on the ground after being exposed to the fire. And that’s when it injured him. I, I, Yeah, I. I was in my mid-20s, probably 24, maybe 25. Deer hunted as a. As a teenager and I’d seen a blood trail. I’d never seen a human blood trail until that day. I saw him afterwards, before he, he was, uh, taken to a hospital. I might get a call from a test guy saying your parts are exploding, except that I was coached very early not to use that word. You know, we did not use the word explode. I was told very early on it was called an energetic disassembly, an ED, and we were coached to stay away from the exploding word. But this was my first indication that things were wrong. We used to say in the industry, if you hurt it, you’re still alive. We could hear things weren’t right. And then from that, we started digging into what was going on. So Kevin, turn me loose to start investigating what was broken. In a failure investigation like this, you’re on a quest for what’s true. So sometimes you have to think out of the box to determine what is true, what’s really going on. I could predict with equations and mathematical models the performance of any other inflator I had worked on prior to that. Nothing in this airbag inflator was behaving properly. They don’t teach you about ammonium nitrate based combustion and the application of a rocket. They do teach you in school how to solve problems. It was just a matter of persistence. I worked tirelessly. I worked till midnight sometimes on this, and it took me months to complete this. It wasn’t something that just happened quickly. And one thing that motivated me to persist in it is that I knew it was a significant find. I knew it was huge. I would do the organization a disservice if I wasn’t thorough in the investigation. Once I got my head around what I thought it was and what would explain it. It was just a matter of not letting go until I had everything. I needed to prove, first to myself what was wrong, and then ultimately to anyone else. That needed to understand the significance of it. You put in propellant and it has energy. When it ignites, it produces gas. So when it releases energy at the wrong rate and there’s too much of it, inflator housing fractures. The propellant has a TNT equivalence of 80% And there’s as much as a third of a stick of dynamite, or half a stick of dynamite wrapped in a steel housing. That’s the auto industry’s dirty secret. I summarize that in a report titled ERL-0144 Propellant Integrity Evaluation. The final summary of my report. Was that an official project needed to be opened to solve the problem of the defects in Takata’s inflators. I was reporting to Kevin. Kevin presented it. The feedback from over Kevin’s level was that it had to go away. I do remember, I have vivid memory of Kevin handing the report back to me. The organization… Would not hear it. Honda was going to be the first customer, and the efforts by Lagrange to get that product ready for release were not stopping. Despite any of the problems in testing. If anybody didn’t believe this was a problem from this data, they were just blind to truth. A fake report was sent to Honda. Misrepresenting parts that had ruptured in validation. There were data points in in that validation report that were taken out. We found them, we wrote the real report, and we distributed to executive management. I would assume that that would bring things to a screeching halt. The agenda was to release this product no matter what. It was just what they wanted to do. It didn’t matter whether it was broken or not. If you look at a lot of the Japanese management, that would make some of these ultimate calls, And they’ve been with Takata in the 70s and the 80s, when it was strictly a textile company. And as they took on airbags, they became in charge of this. Then they have to pick their experts, who they’re going to trust. They picked Paresh. Paresh Kandadia becoming the head of not only your chemical propellant development, the heart of an inflator, but the inflator itself, the device, the mechanical side, which he has no background for. He’s a chemical engineer. Takata bought a bunch of companies. One was the facility in Moses Lake that was Rocket Research run, and they’d been working on ammonium nitrate for years. And with that came a bunch of patents. And he took those patents and he tweaked them. He owned the patents now, and he tweaked them and came up with what he patented. And that was his claim to fame. I mean, he pushed the first ammonium nitrate propellant into high volume automotive production. Dirty deeds done, dirt cheap. Ammonium nitrate is a very low cost, dirt cheap oxidizer. Airbags have to be designed so that they can not degrade when the car’s temperature rises and drops. To high temperatures in the summers, low temperatures in the winter, or on a daily basis, in the morning, overnight. Moisture comes in and out of the propellant. In and out of the propellant as you cycle it through different temperatures. And every time that moisture comes into the propellant, every time it leaves, it sort of pulls that propellant apart a little bit. And Paresh claimed that he stopped that process. Okay, we’re going to cut open a Takata airbag. You hear the thing doing its work. That is the propellant canister. That’s all that’s sealing. It is some adhesive. That’s the only thing keeping moisture out. The ammonium nitrate-based propellant is very water-soluble. Okay,
here it comes. Whoa. These are very small, and there’s a lot of initial surface area. We’ll pour this propellant load in there. So I’m just going to reach in here. I’m going to remove that. They shouldn’t be stuck together, by the way. When they fracture, you totally lose control of the surface area. When this thing goes off, it blasts high-pressure hot gas through these things, and it fractures them like fine china. That is not a good thing. You’ve got a bomb here. Ammonium nitrate has a very long history of being extremely dangerous, having temperature instability issues, of having moisture issues. So this was a big problem. And the only way to solve it was to introduce a drying agent, or a desiccant into the inflator. Desiccant scavenges moisture, the same desiccant packets that are found in pill bottles or in shoe boxes. They’re already admitting that ammonium nitrate has a problem, has a stability problem, because they’re trying desiccants and inflators, and nobody was putting desiccant in inflators back then. A band-aid may correct one thing, but when you have a total system failure, you have to do radical things. And if you lie about that Band-Aid, you go down a trail that nothing good will come from. I heard from a program manager that parts had failed again, you know, even though we had the desiccant in there, there were still some parts that had failed. And that Paresh himself had come and looked at those parts and some of the dissections of those parts and thrown desiccant into the trash. And the reason he threw desiccant in the trash was so he could claim that these inflators didn’t have desiccant, and that’s why they failed. They were built wrong. It was the perfect storm. You had a manufacturing outfit being run by… Inexperienced people, an engineer who wanted to make his mark on the world, pushing his technology. And you had the Japanese who would never disappoint their customer. And that perfect storm led to the big lie. I thought, for sure, once I summarized this and collected all the substantial evidence to prove this inflator had design flaws, that that would be received and that Takata would take a step back. Instead, they shut down the office I was in and the lab. They shut that plant down because truth was coming out of it. It was very bizarre. It was my first experience out of school. By this time, I had two and a half years experience. And I’d never seen anything like this, but I knew this is a normal, this is how corporations normally work. I’m in for a tough life as an engineer. My work-life balance was way out of whack. I was working long hours. I was stressed out. I remember that thinking, oh, wow,
this just couldn’t get any worse. At that point, leaving was the only thing to do. We first got there at the scene, it looked like a minor accident, that everybody should have walked away and been fine. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her, and literally we watched her life pass away in front of us. The airbag was meant to protect 18-year-old Ashley Parm. Instead, it took her life. When I heard about Ashley’s death, I had just come back from Disney World with my family. A low-speed collision that should have otherwise not resulted in death by any means. And I wondered. How many more there would be? A 17-year-old girl from Texas, authorities say, now the newest victim. This is the actual airbag. The images are disturbing. The bloodied bag, metal fragments, including the one that struck 17-year-old Huma Hanif in the neck. This part right here is what flew into Huma’s neck. This is what killed her. I tried to just hold it, you know, where the blood was coming out. Just, but there was, I feel like. That there was not a whole lot I could do. Alexander Brangman’s daughter, Jewel, was killed when a defective airbag exploded during a crash. The 26-year-old was driving a rental car with no idea inside her dash was a ticking time bomb. The recalls were limited, chalked up to manufacturing errors. They tried to fence those recall populations to very small numbers. They were not admitting. A systemic problem of all ammonium nitrate inflators. When I first got involved with this particular set of recalls, I didn’t really think anybody would be obvious about applying the Fight Club formula. It is pretty clearly what Takata did. Economically, that might make sense. It’s against the law to do it that way, but it might make sense for them to do that. But by not warning other people, by not doing recalls and making sure the repairs took place. Place they saved a tremendous amount of money for a while. They cheated the truth. They clearly thought they were going to get away with it, at least for a long time, and they did. I was driving home and it was during a storm, and then fortunately during the storm, there was a power outage. So it was hard to see people coming at me, driving next to me and whatnot. While I was driving, a car turned out in front of me. So I ended up colliding with them, just like a typical fender bender. But it did cause enough impact for my airbags to deploy. When that happened, it was first getting just like smashed in the face. I’ve never been hit in the face, but I can imagine it would be similar. It hurt bad. And the first thing I just remember feeling was that stinging sensation of just pain and then just wet, warm, sticky feeling. And it was because there was a whole bunch of blood. All over me. My right side just instantly blinded. I don’t know why. I just assumed it was because I got knocked in the eye. One of my friends who was with me, he was trying to shake off the accident himself. And he tells me, hey,
Stephanie, we need to get out of the car. I smell smoke because of the airbag deployment. I was like, I can’t move. I don’t think I can. And he turns and looks to me, and then he says, oh,
my God. And, of course, my heart drops. I’m like, what’s wrong with me? I’m sorry. I thought I had sunglasses on because it was kind of coming into dusk and I thought, maybe the lens from… Sorry,
give me a second. I thought, maybe the lens from my sunglasses kind of got jammed up into my eye. Just assumed I lost it. Try to stay a little bit calm because there’s nothing you can do about it at that moment. And I remember telling him, how am I going to live with one eye? At that point, I was in my late 20s, used to life a certain way. Like, how am I, it’s going to be a tough life after that. Mainly, my problem was telling my parents. Sorry. I can deal with a lot. With just me, But knowing that they would have gone through that pain and knowing their daughter was hurt, that’s where it was hard for me. We have evidence of reports dating back to 2000 from engineers within Takata that show that the company was on notice, even before these inflators were introduced into the stream of commerce, that there could, and in fact, in all probability, would be the exact problems that consumers experienced. Takata employs engineers. Engineers have, as their number one ethical responsibility to hold the safety and the welfare of the public paramount. Holding the public safety paramount means you expose the problem, you inform the public of the problem, And you do everything within your power to fix the problem at the earliest opportunity. You don’t kick the can down the road, you don’t bleed society so you can keep the gravy train of profit going, you do the right thing. The Japanese had their own approach, their strategy, which in Japanese would be. Which is, if it stinks, keep a lid on it. They came to me to help them develop a way to know what on earth they were going to say. When a lot of really ugly facts started coming out. I think there was something that was amiss in your testimony, and that was that. Nowhere does it say that Dakota takes full responsibility. So I want to ask you right now, does Dakota take full responsibility for this tragic defect? Tragic this time? Which tragic are you… Does Dakota take responsibility? My understanding is the… Our products in this accident worked anomalies. They had been called before the Senate Commerce Committee. I had told them that you need to send an American executive in and had reiterated to them, you’d better be prepared to tell the truth, to take responsibility for what happened. They basically did the exact opposite of everything I recommended to them. Takata would feed them one line after the next. Oh,
it was a faulty equipment. It was a faulty press. So they could keep isolating it, you know,
find some excuse to isolate the amount. These companies should have done everything they could. They claimed that they notified customers as soon as they found out about the problem, that they expanded the recalls as they learned about each set of additional potentially affected vehicles as soon as they could. I believe that the facts show differently. I ask the committee to do everything in its power to make sure every vehicle with a defective airbag is made safe. Thank you. We will do that, Lieutenant. Thank you, sir. You have our promise. Over the years, in response to questions from safety regulators and its customers, Takata has said it had isolated the problem. It said it had uncovered the mistakes that led to ruptures and that it had pledged that its products were safe. But as we know, the ruptures have continued. U.S. Safety regulators say millions of additional cars on the road right now could have potentially deadly airbags. Millions of vehicles being driven on roads with airbags that could potentially explode violently. Regulators say the number of vehicles that need to be fixed has doubled in size. The largest automotive recall ever. I saw the news of the biggest recall in automotive history. I could just imagine millions of these things in the field. So I stopped by a couple of car dealerships on my way home from work one afternoon. 200. We should be building them. Okay.
And shrink, wrap them, send them all Fedex back to the car. We’ll set up here, They usually keep them on, like a certain order, until they eventually have to build a pallet. Appreciate it, John.
250 inflators were being pulled out of cars, put into cardboard boxes, saran wrapped on a pallet and shipped. That shocked me. I could not believe that. Shipped with Class 9 hazard exemption, as if they are brake pads or something. 250 on a pallet. 50 pallets? A truck could easily haul that. That’s 12,000 inflators on one truck. Five or six trucks on the road hauling that number. 65. Thousand on the road. At any given time, there’s a high likelihood that one of those is going to run off the road and catch fire. It is totally ridiculous that the companies are allowed to ship explosive inflators like they were paper towels, yet. My wife and my kids are driving next to big 80,000 pound 18 wheelers that, in the back of that 53 foot trailer, have tens of thousands of pounds of these inflators in them. That presents an extreme degree of risk to the rights, safety and welfare of innocent motorists on our highways. So it doesn’t scare you at all that that’s got a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate on it. I have you guys driving them around in 200, 250 of them without any hazmat at all. I mean,
you don’t say to put any hazmat on there, so I don’t know why. Any product that’s being shipped either shows up someplace on the hazardous materials table. It’s in the hazardous materials regulations. If it doesn’t show up on the table, it’s not regulated. Run your finger across this table and it will tell you what class that product goes with. Anything that blows up, to me, is almost surely going to be in the class 1. It’s going to be an explosive. Things that blow up don’t belong in class 9. It was clear to me they fall into a class 1. A class 1-2. specifically, when you look at the fragmentation hazard. A Class 9 allows them to ship in a cardboard box. With hazard exemption, more or less. I called the Dot and I said, Have you guys thought about the shipping hazards associated with this? They said, write me a letter. I put it in a letter and I thought, well,
I’ve written this letter, I’ll change the names and send it to senators, congressmen, anyone that would listen. The Senate Commerce Committee asked me to come up and discuss my concerns. I was excited because it’s an opportunity to not only share my report, but also share concerns about a truck explosion. I felt this relief. Because somebody in authority was now going to solve this problem. I wasn’t going to have to worry about it again. I had a series of follow-up conference calls. In one of those calls, they shared with me that they didn’t even have $10,000 to do the test. How you would go about proving what class something fits in would be, first, to look at the manual. If there’s really any question about it, you can do your own tests. If the test was going to get done, I was going to have to do it myself with my own money. I just had to really apply a blue-collar work ethic. It may look like you’re obsessed with what you’re doing. A level of… Persistence that some people might not understand. I had to get the airbags to test. So I walked into one store, bought 40 recalled airbags on one day. Another brick and mortar store bought 28 on the next day, the next day, 24. So within three days, I bought 92 recalled airbags. Every inflator I pulled out of a car, I use this screwdriver for. I felt like such a ninja with this thing. That’s what I consider myself, a airbag inflator ninja. You’ve spent hours every day just scanning the internet, looking for airbag inflators. I’ll never forget the day you came down and you said, Debra,
I just found, like,
I can’t remember, a whole bunch of the ones that are going to blow up. And you said, I didn’t even tell them this time that they’re recalled because they’ll just stop talking to me. So I just bought them all. And I thought, Oh my goodness. But then I thought, every time I walk into the basement and I can feel my blood pressure rising, like, I’m so irritated that we have all this junk of airbag inflators. Every one of them, I remind myself, represents someone’s life that has been saved. Because you’ve chosen to really spend your time and your money doing that. The theory is that heat’s going to make the inflators explode. I knew that it was highly likely that inflators were going to explode when you put hundreds of them in a fire. But to have the confidence I needed to go forward with the cost of the test, I really needed to retire that risk. By buying toaster ovens. To prove I was right. That is what the industry uses to tell if an inflator is going to blow up or not. If you go to… Any company that makes airbag inflators, you’ll find toaster ovens in the dumpster. No airbag should ever fail a slow cook-off test. We are going to test an inflator in the oven, in a trash can, a steel trash can. We’re just going to place the inflator in the oven. Place the oven in the trash can. It’ll probably take 45 minutes. If we see an inflator in an oven actually cause structural failure to a steel trash can, I think that would be proof. It’s not a negligible fragmentation hazard. The inflator fragmented, shot out like a bullet that punched through the trash can. You’re not shipping them in metal trash cans, you’re shipping them in cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes. We’re going to put this in a charcoal grill. We’re going to take it up to 500 or 600 degrees C and see what happens. This is So, I don’t know where the inflator is. It fragmented it. The fire is full of inflator filter. Look at this. Look at the GoPro. See that? That’s a metal piece of the inflator in there. It fragmented. What is that? Whoa! A huge piece of that filter launched all the way over here. Look at that! That’s a long way! Look how far it had to get around those trees! Dude,
that’s like 150 feet! This is the stuff, if it could travel this far, it could kill you. This is tough stuff, you know? It takes a lot of energy to do that. It fractured all of these. This emulates… A slower heat rate, as if the inflator were in a diesel fire, then got heaved out of it by a sister inflator. And it really bothers me now that I’ve seen this, that these things are being shipped around in cardboard boxes. First responders that would come up to a truck on fire need to know what’s in it. And people transporting these things need to know what they’re hauling. If we think about the… 53-foot box trailer being pulled by an 18-wheeler full of airbag inflators. We’re talking about, what, maybe five, ten times the amount of explosive that was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. I mean,
we’re talking about an amount of explosives that can wipe out a city block for the most part. Yet. It’s not regulated any more than a load full of paper towels or toilet paper that’s being pulled by the same truck. Does that seem right to you? Hundreds of them, up to thousands of them together, even one or two of them detonating, can set the entire load off. It’s a giant vehicle-borne IED is what it is. It’s just a big recipe for disaster. I’ve told John so many times that he didn’t have to have a midlife crisis. God gave him this. It’s kept him focused and excited. Again,
it has to be God-given. Because he did not give it to me, and I would have written my letter and moved on. He’s doing what he’s supposed to do. When I see that, the… The data supports what my theory was, I feel like I’m on the right track. After seeing that the slow cook-off proved these inflators are a fragmentation hazard, I knew the bonfire Test, or, heaven forbid, a truck hauling inflators that would be a real bonfire scenario was a real risk. I’m about to start what I’m going to call project Cage the Elephant, and that is a code name for a cage designed to house. Recalled airbag inflator suspected blowing up. I didn’t want to notify the government of a problem without also offering a solution. So I thought, well, what could you do? And the obvious thing to do in this case is not ship them in cardboard boxes, but put them in steel containers. That holds the shrapnel in. That would fix the problem. We would bend. Hours and hours in the basement with the kids being at school. They would go days without seeing him, even though the house is not big. It’s a small house. Our goal was to use the money to buy a house in the better school zone, but we weren’t able to do that. You know,
that’s the money out of our pocket. So, I mean,
what do you say about it? What can you do? It is what it is. We just move on. Thank you. The purpose of a bonfire test is ultimately a United States Department of Transportation test requirement put on to manufacturers of pyrotechnic devices so that they are able to ship them. And the purpose of it is to simulate the what-if scenario, the possibility that during transport, a truck flips over and there’s a fire. There’s these very strict requirements, that says you have to put them onto a fire. And you have to burn it. And you have to make sure that they self-dispose, that they don’t eject fragments, that even if they just come off, that they don’t fly too far where they could hurt somebody. And so you have to demonstrate this. We could take these things and put them in a bonfire test and write a report, but the DOT wouldn’t acknowledge it. Unless just about three or four individuals and… Our country, we’re there to witness it. Thomas Chang was one of them. Thomas Chang is the credentialed expert that The Dot acknowledges, who’s certified to witness the test. And that’s that. Yeah, just like you lay them out here, okay, orderly fashion, so I get a picture afterwards. Yeah, for Pistons, we’ll get. We’ll do it by container, we’ll take a picture of what was in this container, and then we’ll do, and then we’ll put them back in this container. And yeah, there he is, thank you, so how many do we have together? We get you another 157. 63 intact PSPis, four intact SVIS, 47 PSDIS, three of which are fragmented. We put 157 airbag inflators into the fire. Between 5 and 10 percent blew up, like pipe bombs or hand grenades. So much so on the small container that it bent the rebar. If you’re shipping 250 on a pallet and you have them in cardboard boxes, more would have blown up. Because the ones that are heaved out of the fire heat at a slower rate. They are more dangerous once they’ve been subjected to the fire. Highstanders could believe they’re out of harm’s way. When those things start deploying, like hand grenades. That’s essentially what happened at Dakota during the test that injured a technician because the inflator exploded. Thomas wrote a report that witnessed the test, and he wrote about what he saw. And one of the things, he wrote is, these do not qualify for Class 9. That is written in his report. I’ve never seen the dot go against Thomas’s recommendations. Okay, this is my request to reconsider. In accordance with 49 C.F.R. 107.113, your application is denied. I requested a Class 9 exemption for the airbags if they were in a container that mitigated the hazard. They denied that. Your request for expedited treatment is denied. That’s their way of saying, we’re not going to do it. Today, Japan’s Takata Corporation confirmed a truck carrying airbag inflators and a volatile chemical blew up last week in Texas. One woman was killed. The blast leveled a home, shooting pieces of the tractor trailer and its contents up to a mile. Ten homes in a two-mile radius reported damage. Not much is left of the semi. It was hauling Takata, airbag inflators and a volatile propellant. The Maverick County, Texas sheriff says the scene looked like a bomb went off. Part of the engine flew at least 30 yards, ending up in a house. After a two-day search, police determined 67-year-old Lucila Robles died in the blast that destroyed her home. It made me sick to my stomach when I actually saw the news. What I had warned of three months earlier had happened. I wanted to know if Don Berger was available. I didn’t have an appointment with him. I originally had one with somebody that worked for him, but I just wanted to stop by. On the off chance he was in the office, he said, he probably would not be in the office, but is there any way you could bring him and see if he’s here? I think this is my one and there’s a person there. Oh,
where’s the person going? Okay. Hey, Bill,
this is John Keller. I stopped by. I know you said you were out of the office. Is it? Actually, we were in D.C. And we drove right by the building. Stopped in and see me there. I know you said you were busy with the union stuff. Since it’s in the week, I thought I’d see you. Can you have a minute? Are you tied up today? Thank you anyway. I appreciate it. You too.
Bye. I got the message. We are not accessible, is what I gather. Five
years ago, I didn’t realize how much time I had. I fished a lot. I had fun. I had more time with my kids. The first house I sold, I was planning to move and get my kids to the better area of town. And I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I couldn’t buy hundreds of airbags and subject them to testing and do that. So we had to make the decision not to move. I sold that house and spent the money on airbags. I really started wrestling with God about whether or not he made me to be an engineer. Was this really what I should be doing? I just started thinking, maybe I would do better in sales or something. It seemed like it would be maybe a better life. This is something that is beyond anything I’ve seen before. I would have quit a long time ago. I can’t fathom working on something and just like going up against big entities, that… They do not care what you think, or what you say, or how much you say it. They’ve moved on. They really have moved on. And he has not. I don’t know. How do you keep on? It’s inside of them. Nobody can accept the principle that an infinite value should be put on an individual life. Because in order to get the money involved, in order to get the resources involved, it’s not money. In order to get through, sorry,
they have to come from someone. Ford produced the Ford Pinto knowing full well that in any rear end collision, the gas tank would blow up. Because they had failed to install a $13 plastic block in front of the gas tank. And Ford estimated in an internal memo that that would cost about 200 lives a year. And they estimated further that the cost of each life would be $200,000. They multiplied, and they found that the cost of installing those blocks in each of the cars would be more than the cost of saving those 200 lives. And over the past seven years, the car has been produced and over a thousand lives have been lost. You know that your chance of being killed in a Pindo is greater than your chance of being killed in a mack truck. No,
I didn’t. I didn’t know that the gas tank would rupture. Of course, it is a question. Well, one of us, separately in this room, could, at a cost, reduce his risk of dying tomorrow. You don’t have to walk across the street. The real fundamental principle is that people individually should be free to decide how much they’re willing to pay for, reducing the chances of their death. Now,
people mostly aren’t willing to pay very much. I personally regard this as very, very illogical. I see people on all sides of me smoking. Now,
there’s no doubt, nobody denies that that increases their chance of death. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be free to smoke, don’t misunderstand me. I just think they’re fools to do it. Sometimes we’re asked, how much money is a human life worth? And that’s a very difficult question to answer. I mean,
the government has statistics of what the average human life is worth. But doesn’t it go beyond that? I mean, we don’t consider our relatives to be average people. If it’s my wife’s life, they don’t have enough money. If it’s my kid’s life, there isn’t enough money to ever replicate what they’re worth. If you talk to the parents of Huma Hanif, who was a young girl, just starting her life, that was tragically ended by a Takata inflator. If you ask her parents, say, Can I give you $100 million, but you don’t get your daughter back? They’ll say, we’ll take our daughter back. I just don’t understand how anyone could live with themselves to be able to put money over lives or safety. For anybody who says that a few deaths is… You know,
is worth a billion dollars or settling it, then is it your brother? Is it your daughter? It’s an extension of the same old argument that we’ve heard from the days of the Pinto and the days of the Firestone tires and Ford Explorers, and the days of the GM ignition switches. And it just continues on and on and on. Do you agree or disagree with NHTSA’s call for a nationwide recall, Mr. Shimoso? Senator, it’s hard for me to answer yes or no, so if you allow me… It is not hard for you to answer yes or no. Do you support the nationwide recall of airbags that the Department of Transportation has issued, yes or no? Japanese airbag maker Takata has filed for bankruptcy with up to $50 billion in liabilities. Federal prosecutors came down hard today on auto airbag manufacturer Takata. The company faces huge fines and several of its executives are looking at the possibility of extensive jail time. Takata, They were certainly willing to do everything they could to continue the gravy train, if you will. And it… Bled society, both figuratively and for some of the clients that I had, with carotid arteries severed and jugular veins severed. They bled them, literally. This morning, another person now dead because of faulty Takata airbags. That woman in California died after her airbag inflator exploded during a crash, sending metal fragments into the car. Faulty Takata airbag responsible for yet. Another day, a 24th known person worldwide did die in connection to an exploding Takata airbag inflator. I want to show you all of these killed by exploding airbags just in the U.S. alone. There’s still millions of dangerous and potentially deadly airbags on the road. It’s the largest automotive safety problem that’s ever existed. Recall has been going since 2008. It continues to grow. Right now in the U.S. We’ll have 70 million inflators on Recall. Dangerous, kind of first generation takata inflators without desiccant. The need to come off the road, need to come off the road fast. There’s a kind of distinction, point, pre-desiccant and post-desiccant. And right now, we’ve recalled all the non-desiccated inflators, which are definitely the most dangerous, the soonest. But there’s… Other inflators out there with desiccant, that are a big problem. We should never trust Takata built them right or didn’t fraudulently ship them. There’s an ultimately fraudulent company that should not have been in the business of making airbags. And these other inflators that are out there are certainly going to have casualties and injuries from them. NHTSA needs to publish a list of every vehicle that has a Takata ammonium nitrate inflator in it, whether it’s desiccated or undesiccated. The driving public deserves to know. People are not getting warned. All of the statistics I have seen, all of the information that’s available, indicates that people do not understand what they are dealing with here. And there’s very good reason to believe that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 more people are going to get blasted by these airbags in the next few years. There’s just an awful lot that has to happen, and none of it’s happened. One or 2,000 people are going to get these. Hand grenades are going to blow up in their faces, and I can’t bear the thought of that. The companies themselves should be aggressively trying to protect their customers. But how do you air an ad that says, hey,
our old cars could kill you. Buy our new ones. You’ve really got to wonder what’s going on. There’s customers that have been waiting upwards of three years for their replacements. Three years. These automakers need to take responsibility. It may have been Takata that screwed them, but they sold the vehicles. We know that the auto industry isn’t doing everything in their power to get these vehicles off the road because the vehicles are still on the road. We also know that the replacement inflators may, very likely will, have similar problems in years into the future. I get a notification saying, hey,
take your car in. There’s a recall notice on your airbag. Next day, I go to the dealership. He was like, oh,
don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not. And it’s not as big of a deal as they’re making it out to be. He had a computer behind him. I’m like,
hey, does that computer have internet? Can you just google my name real quick? Just google the airbag recall. You know, first thing comes up is one of my, that accident photo. He just kind of froze. He’s like, hey, it can happen, and it is a huge deal. Please stop telling people. Don’t worry about it. We started out with 4,000 airbags in 2008, and now we’re… 130 plus million across the world, you know,
and it continued to grow and to grow, and to grow. They could have been way out ahead of this if they weren’t recalling a couple thousand in 2008, and they dove into it better. So I don’t know if they’re in cahoots or if they’re incompetent. Is the Department of Transportation influenced by special interest groups? Yes,
at least as much as any other agency in government. And it’s largely because the people who work as regulators. Who are supposed to set and enforce the rules, they go into the government, they go into the Department of Transportation to do good. But then they leave to do well. They can make 10 times as much money working for a company that they were regulating the day before. Particularly in the Takata situation, you had multiple former secretaries of transportation, multiple former administrators of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Perfectly willing to accept consulting fees to create what they called a quality assurance panel. A proposal from former Secretary of Transportation landed on Shigesa Takata’s desk, told the chairman of the company that the only thing they needed to do was to recruit more allies and confidants in Washington. Never said a word about doing anything to save anybody’s life or anything else. It was just, you need more allies and confidants. If you write me a check, and if you’re prepared to write checks to those folks, I will go find them for you. Within a few days, they had signed up two other former secretaries of Transportation and four former NTSID administrators. Who put their names on that quality assurance panel that I mentioned earlier. That’s how the system works. Thank you. NHTSA declares 56 million Takata airbag inflators don’t need rehaul. It stresses me out having all those inflators down there just everywhere. Drives me crazy. My dream was, of course, to have the basement finished up for the kids to have, you know. A place to play, and instead, it’s a mess. But I would never ask him to quit. Since I met him, I can think of no time in all these years that he has ever thought of something. Or felt passionate about something that he needed to do, or he felt like needed to be done, that he didn’t make happen. It’s infuriating. Inflators are being shipped all over the country in cardboard boxes. Nothing’s changing that. There’s still thousands for sale on eBay. Nothing’s changing that. Steve Bradbury represented Takata when they said desiccant would fix the problem. By 2020, he was running the Dot when the decision was made to not recall Takata’s desiccated inflators. I was blissfully ignorant about the way our system works and that system’s broken. I’m madder now about the way things are than I’ve ever thought about being then. That makes me want to just not stop. We’re gonna go in and we’re gonna place an inflator on a pedestal, and we’re gonna connect lead wires to it. So we can apply electrical connection like the car would when it’s deploying. We have not done anything to change the hardware, to make them more likely to explode. The only thing we’ve done is what the car companies do to simulate environmental aging, thermal cycles. We put them through very low temperatures, very high temperatures, and these inflators are likely to explode. There’s no legitimate justification for not recalling the desiccated inflators. They need to come off the road. Just like all of Takata’s garbage. I’m going to prove it. Thundercat, 21, is armed. Firing in 3, 2, 1.
That is like a 12-gauge slug. As I’ve learned more information about this problem. I’ve known I was uniquely equipped to do something. That’s what I’ve learned since this started firing in three, two, one, it’s through that steel, like it was butter. This was purchased new from a dealership. Two, one. Three, two, one. That was the second chamber. There’s an ignition delay by probably 10 or 20 milliseconds. Oh my God, look at that. I truly believe it shocks him that they’re still getting sold as replacement parks just to anybody on the internet. Three, two, one. I think what drives him is the desire to truly get these things off the market and out of people’s cars. Where they cannot harm people anymore. When the government is just as involved in the cover-up and not stopping it, it makes you so sad. Because you know they know. And you think, well,
our government cares. They’re going to do something about this. They’re not going to continue this to allow this to occur. And then, no, not really. Wow,
if it’s happening in this area, what else is going on? The thing we… Are teaching the kids with this over and over again is you do what’s right, no matter what the price is? And that’s what he’s doing, he’s doing what’s right. I’m not confused about what God made me to do, I’m an engineer. This is what I was meant to do. Thank you. One of the things that I find most disturbing, and in some ways shocking, is the fact that so few people continue to know about this. Or appreciate the clear danger that continues to exist. The call to action is to tell people, your airbag could kill you. All you have to do is check your ViN and those of your friends, and you will know, and you can save lives tomorrow. The solution cannot be hide. Our heads in the sand and settle with the few unfortunates who do get injured and and mourn the mistakes of the past. For those who die, because we can stop the deaths and we need to. My biggest fear about this is not just that Dakota Airbags are going to continue blasting people. My biggest fear is that the process, the system that made that happened, that allowed that to happen. That system is still in place. Anybody who watches this documentary needs to understand it’s on you. This is your car. This is your life. You are the one who has to deal with this because your government is not going to do it for you. The manufacturers are not going to do it for you. The dealers are not going to do it. The folks at the DMV are not going to deal with it for you. You’ve got to deal with it yourself. Ultimately, you’ve got it. The. The corporation is doing a cost benefit analysis. The only way to punish them, since we won’t put people in jail and send them for long sentences for criminal conduct, the only way to punish them is is with money. The way to make a change is for consumers to say, hey, until you fix our product, we are not going to be your consumers any longer. I hope that the consumer fights back about their safety and the considerations that companies have for their well-being. Obviously, it wasn’t taken into consideration whenever I was driving, right?
It wasn’t a big deal. My car wasn’t even flagged as being one of the cars that were supposed to be recalled, I think, at the time. So a whole outrage. From the general population comes up to where these corporations listen. But no one’s really bringing this topic up to where the corporations are forced to listen and to take these seriously. I hope even one person seeing an interview that I do, Then they enter in their VIN number or check their car or change their airbag, take it in. That’s one person.

A former Takata engineer unveils the hidden dangers behind the largest automotive recall in history. Airbags, designed for protection, instead pose a serious risk due to a critical defect.
Despite warnings and alarming incidents, companies and regulators have downplayed the issue. Through undercover investigations and rigorous testing, a whistleblower exposes the truth behind this industry crisis. His mission: to inform the public and prevent further accidents.
But will the industry take responsibility before more vehicles become part of the problem? This eye-opening documentary reveals the untold story of corporate oversight and the fight for automotive safety.

Original Title : Ticking Time Bomb, The Truth Behind Takata Airbag
Written, Produced and Directed by Joseph Braun