Hiroko Tabuchi: Takata's road to a deadly crisis

The firm's airbags are now at the center of the auto industry's biggest recall

In the late 1990s, General Motors got an unexpected and enticing offer. A little-known Japanese supplier, Takata, had designed a much cheaper automotive airbag.

GM turned to its airbag supplier, Autoliv, and asked it to match the cheaper design or risk losing business, according to a senior scientist at Autoliv.

But when Autoliv's scientists studied the Takata airbag, they found that it relied on a dangerously volatile compound in its inflater, a critical part that causes the airbag to expand.

Today, that compound is at the heart of the largest automotive safety recall in history. At least 14 people have been killed and more than 100 injured by faulty inflaters made by Takata. More than 100 million of its airbags have been installed in cars in the US by GM and 16 other firms.

Details of GM's decision-making process 20 years ago suggest a quest for savings of just a few dollars per airbag compromised a critical safety device. The findings also indicate that automakers played a far more active role in the prelude to the crisis: Rather than being the victims of Takata's missteps, automakers pressed their suppliers to put cost before all else.

Tom Wilkinson, a spokesman for GM, said the Takata discussions "occurred two decades ago between old GM and a supplier," and therefore it was "not appropriate for us to comment."

Even with the recall, deadly accidents and research critical of ammonium nitrate, Takata continues to manufacture airbags with the compound - and automakers continue to buy them. The airbags appear in the 2016 models of seven automakers, and they are also being installed in cars as replacement airbags for those being recalled.

Takata said it had taken steps to protect the ammonium nitrate it uses against temperature changes, which contributes to its volatility. The manufacturer said it was also studying inflaters with a drying agent.

'It turned into shrapnel'

The new airbag came not a moment too soon for Takata.

It had been making seatbelts in the US since the mid-1980s, but its airbag business, which it began in earnest in the 1990s, was in trouble.

A previous generation supplied to Nissan had the problem of deploying too forcefully. Those airbags were linked to at least 40 eye injuries in the 1990s.

Takata began experimenting with alternative propellants. But, in 1997 its inflater plant in the US, was rocked by a series of explosions that destroyed equipment and greatly curtailed production, according to insurance claims made at the time.

After the blast, Takata was forced to buy inflaters from competitors and airlift them to automakers across the country. The company's American business struggled "to maintain corporate viability," Takata said in a lawsuit filed against its insurer.

It was against this backdrop that Takata embraced the new compound, ammonium nitrate, in its airbag inflaters. Mark Lillie, who had worked as an engineer at Takata, told The New York Times in 2014 that considerations over cost spurred the supplier to use the compound. Mr Lillie raised concerns in the late 1990s, but his warnings went unheeded.

Around the same time, the team at Autoliv was asked to study the Takata design. Mr Taylor, the head Autoliv chemist, said his team immediately recognised the risks posed by the ammonium nitrate.

"We tore the Takata airbags apart, analysed all the fuel, identified all the ingredients," he said. The takeaway was that when the airbag was detonated, "the gas is generated so fast, it blows the inflater to bits."

Mr Hock, the former member of Mr Taylor's team, said: "When we lit it off, it totally destroyed the fixture," he said. "It turned it into shrapnel."

Fiat Chrysler declined to comment, while Honda, Mitsubishi and Toyota said that they had not located any pertinent information from that period.

The dangers associated with ammonium nitrate made it difficult at times for Takata to find a supplier.

Airbag design and performance specifications are set by a consortium of automakers, with little involvement by safety regulators. In congressional testimony, Takata has insisted that specifications set by the automakers did not anticipate the problems caused by exposure to heat and humidity over many years.

But a review of the consortium's design and performance specifications shows the industry had raised concerns about ammonium nitrate a decade ago.

A 2004 update to its specifications singled out ammonium nitrate inflaters and required them to "undergo added stability evaluation."

The problem, it appears, is that no one enforced the specifications.

The update was issued four years before Honda started issuing recalls in 2008. It was not until 2013 that other automakers started recalling cars. Today, 64 million defective airbags have been subject to recall.

The lack of enforcement points to the self-regulatory nature of automotive manufacturing.

A former Takata engineer who spoke to The Times and who was recently deposed by Honda in litigation with Takata revealed how easily the supplier avoided detection in getting the defective airbags to market.

Workers at a now-closed Takata plant in the US manipulated tests meant to measure whether inflaters were airtight, said the former engineer, who still works in the automotive industry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. His testimony in the lawsuit has not yet been made public. The tests involved inserting a small amount of helium gas into the inflaters. The inflaters were then put in a vacuum. If too much helium was detected outside the inflater, that meant the inflater had a leak, was defective and should be scrapped.

But workers at the La Grange factory would take the defective inflaters and test them repeatedly, to deplete the helium. With no helium left inside, the inflaters would pass the test, according to the engineer. The workers would then give the defective inflaters new bar code identifiers, so the repeated testing could not be tracked. The engineer said he questioned his Takata bosses in 2001 about manipulating the tests, but was told "not to come back to any more meetings." He left the company later that year.

Susan Bairley, a spokeswoman for the consortium led by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, said it did not keep records "of discussions leading to research results," so it could not comment on concerns that might have resulted from the 2004 update to its airbag specifications. G.M. and Ford referred questions back to the consortium; Fiat Chrysler declined to comment.

©The New York Times News Services