Takata, after 11 years of chasing uncontrolled explosions in its airbag inflators, said it would “rapidly” phase out ammonium nitrate as a propellant after its association with more than 100 injuries, six deaths, and extremely high failure rates that have led to the auto industry’s largest-ever recall.
In a Tuesday hearing with the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, Takata executive vice president Kevin Kennedy said the Japanese auto supplier would stop using the chemical in all driver’s-side inflators using the “batwing-shaped” propellant wafers. Kennedy (pictured above, at left) said Takata was the only airbag manufacturer to continue using ammonium nitrate as a “main propellant” in its inflators.
“Overall, you will see our production of ammonium nitrate go down rapidly,” he said. “It certainly got a bad reputation through all of this.”
In its place, Takata will use guanidine nitrate. He stopped short of calling ammonium nitrate unsafe, as some former Takata employees have claimed in media interviews, and said Takata was continuing to produce new airbag components with the compound. He denied Takata switched to ammonium nitrate to cut costs and said it was a better alternative to the “toxic” sodium azide the company previously used.
“Every development, there is always a spirited debate about what are the right components, what is the right design,” he said. “We made investments in order to process ammonium nitrate. We were having good success with ammonium nitrate. It was competitive. It had a number of other advantages to it that our customers enjoyed. It wasn’t until these recent issues that we had to reconsider it.”
Since Takata began manufacturing replacement parts in January 2014—months after the recall first broke in April 2013 with just six automakers—the company has shipped 4 million replacement parts. Since a nationwide expansion of driver’s side airbags in December, Takata has doubled production to 700,000 per month and will reach 1 million per month by September. Takata’s direct competitors are making half of the replacement parts and will make 70 percent of all replacements by the year’s end. Even so, at this rate, according to Committee Chairman Michael Burgess (R-Texas), it could take three years before every car can be fixed.
What’s worse for the 34 million affected car owners is the possibility that their new airbags, many of which use the same propellant, could become just as defective and susceptible to humidity over time. That span of time when the inflators become defective, according to Kennedy, is about seven-and-a-half to 12 years. NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind admitted car owners may need multiple repairs until the problem is solved.
“Some of these [replacements] may not have the longevity needed for the lifetime of the vehicle,” Rosekind said.
Takata’s alarming failure rates and knowledge of the issue since at least 2004—after switching from the allegedly pricier synthetic compound Tetrazole in 1999 and changing the compound again in 2008—is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the company, and the 10 affected automakers that together built nearly 34 million vehicles in the U.S. with the potentially defective parts. While ammonium nitrate is one of the definite causes of the faulty parts, Kennedy said Takata’s testing still has not proven why certain airbag inflators have exploded with excessive force and shot shrapnel through the bag, while others from the same production line have not.
While Kennedy said he was confident in the replacement parts, Takata will “continue to test the remedy parts and outside the scope of the recalls” since it does not understand the actual problem. Part of the issue, Kennedy said, is the amount of desiccant (the dry material, like the silica gel bags you find in shoe boxes, that reduces moisture) the company added to the inflators. No problems have been found in inflators without desiccant, he said.
“Properly designed and manufactured phase-stabilized ammonium nitrate can be done properly,” he said. “We are continuing to use phase-stabilized ammonium nitrate in our propellants, both with and without desiccant.”
Since February, when NHTSA said it began penalizing Takata $14,000 per day for not explaining its internal files, Takata has racked up $1.2 million in fines. Takata is also under a federal investigation by the Southern District of New York—the same district that is investigating GM’s faulty ignition switches and which won a $1.2 billion settlement from Toyota for unintended acceleration—which suggests Takata may face a full-blown criminal case.
The company also is leading its own internal audit headed by former transportation secretary Samuel Skinner and has said it would make the results public. Meanwhile, automakers including Toyota, Honda, and Mazda are conducting third-party testing on the recalled inflators to determine the exact problem, which has remained unclear since the first Takata airbag recalls began on Honda vehicles in 2008.
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