Takata Airbags - How Far and Wide?

The Takata airbag problems that first hit my radar in early 2013 were never contained. (my post from April 2013)

The Detroit news summarized recent additional recalls.  As of October NHTSA said 10 automotive manufacturers have issued recalls affecting 6.1 million vehicles in the U.S. with potentially defective airbag inflators. (Freep)

Ford Motor Co. said Thursday it will expand a driver-side air bag recall nationwide, adding 447,310 additional vehicles as demanded by the U.S. government — the third of five automakers to do so.

The air bags can send shrapnel into drivers and passengers. Until now, most of the vehicles recalled were in high-humidity areas. 

Key lessons that I highlighted at the time: 

1. Track your material.  In the case of Honda, the location of specific lots of wafers could not be tracked which caused wider ranging searches.  In another specific additional recall, Honda lost track of a few thousand service parts resulting in recall notices being sent to hundreds of thousands of customers for serial number inspections of previously repaired cars.
2. Do a good investigation of problems.  When the 1st incident occurred there should have been an effective problem solving exercise.  However, it seems that there were some gaps in the process. As a result the recalls were slow to occur and covered too few suspect vehicles. This resulted in higher costs and risk to customers.  Did I mention at least one person died from this issue?

Because the root cause was not specifically identified and airbags with those defects caused by the root causes were not identified the recalls have continued to expand since 2013.

In early and mid December 2014 Takata released a Chairman's Statement and an Open Letter, neither of which goes beyond buzzwords and details exactly what happened to cause the incidents.

We have expended extraordinary resources to respond to the reports of inflator ruptures. Our engineers have conducted a top-to-bottom review of our manufacturing procedures and exhaustive analyses of potential root causes. We have addressed issues as they have been identified and have made improvements in our products and production methods where warranted.

Takata is still looking for potential root causes.  Nissan explains the effects of the root cause: "The propellant could potentially deteriorate over time due to environmental factors [due to many years in high humidity conditions], which could lead to over-aggressive combustion in the event of an air bag deployment. This could create excessive internal pressure within the inflator and could cause the inflator housing to rupture."

But why could the propellant deteriorate? We still do not know if it is due to compaction problems (density) during manufacturing, or excess humidity during manufacturing?   We do not know how high humidity areas of the country seem to exacerbate the problem?  Doesn't the fact that high humidity environment has an affect mean that there is a problem with the propellant environmental containment system?

The slow rate of progress and lack of investigation process still baffles me.

Does your vehicle need attention?  Here is a NHTSA site where you can do a VIN search for recalls.