Really impressive how you can take jabs at capitalism when a company acts in a negligent manner to cut costs while ignoring that those actions were taken by a company that had already established their market share. Even more tone deaf is the condemnation of capitalism when capitalism is solely responsible for the decades of innovation that you had literally just discussed.
How do we get ahold of a couple of those air bags. We can send them to all the air bag seat prank dummies that went viral… only this time it will be sweet revenge for the dummies that got blasted with the old style of air bags.
@@BrettShadow japanese car fanboy trying to justify his choice in vehicle.....after purchasing it with proceeds from working in a capitalist system.....and the vehicle only being available due to supply and demand of....you guessed it....a capitalist system. I wonder how many North Koreans can buy a honda fit? 🤔
Honda Canada was so aggressive about the recall, they sent letter after letter and made phone call after phone call, they got pretty agitated that I was ignoring the recall. My reason was my 2001 Accord CG2 wasn't running so I couldn't bring it in. They came and changed the airbag in my driveway while I was at work.
Man that's dedication, my work van (Dodge) had an active recall for a cooling fan for the engine, but the kicker was there wasn't a fix available at the time from any of the dealers in our area, and we ended up retiring it out of service before hearing any more about the recall, the service centres in our area apparently never received the replacement parts that we needed
@@GearGuardianGaming They're only this big on safety because that specific model and year is designated an "alpha" car, meaning the airbag is way more likely to send shrapnel into your face. Any other inflator and they'll just spam you with letters till you show up. They had me running to junkyards to replace inflators of several alpha cars (and only alpha cars) one time.
That was the case with Nissan here in Australia. I must have received a dozen letters from them over the years about my 2005 Pulsar, long after I'd sold it for scrap!
Silly me, I actually PAID EXTRA for a vintage Chevy that has a solid steering column that will impale me and a solid hood known to cut the driver in half during front end collisions. And two giant saddle tanks on either side that blow up on impact! The original owner didn't get the seatbelt option... Back in the day GM knew how to prevent lawsuits and recalls - don't let them survive!
This. 🤣😂 My first car was a 1975 AMC Gremlin and I loved the little death trap. No power steering, no power brakes, only a single lap belt up front and nothing for the back seat. Recently I suggested to my dad that we should get it road worthy again, and he balked at the idea, saying that it wasn't safe! It's almost like he loves his grandkids more than he loves his own kids, knowing who's gonna be driving it soon!
@@mrblack5145 LOL, my dad was the one who suggested the truck I bought. I don't think "how safe is this vehicle" is a question I've ever asked myself. It still ain't a motorcycle...their "air bag" is gravel.
As an engineer, I guarantee you that the company treated the engineers like garbage when they raised their concerns, then blamed them once they forced them and everything didn't go according to plan. Business people seem to really think you can just ignore things like physics, because with enough engineering you can defy all reality. Sadly, this is why you should never comply when forced to do something like this and leave the company once you've realized that's the type of company they are.
Execs and admins tend to make insane demands and figure “some smart guy” down the line will figure out how to do it. They then promote the middle managers who promise it can be done, realistically or not. Engineers and technical workers are the ones who end up breaking their backs trying to make it work and then get the blame when it becomes clear that it can’t.
Totally different industry (I'm a truck driver) but this applies pretty broadly. Driving when too tired is a big problem in trucking. One piece of advice I give to newbie truck drivers is that if their dispatcher is ever pressuring them to drive when they believe they are too tired to drive safely, it's time to find a new company. Some other company will be happy to hire you BECAUSE you refused to drive when you knew it wasn't safe. Delivering late is bad, but it's better than a crashed truck.
Business people are funny. They don't have to know anything about what you said. Science? Whatever. Just let it break what could go wrong. There's no incentive for them to do the right thing. And then yea they blame the engineers for their mistakes. Seen it happen personally and also, look at Boeing.
A few years ago my mom got a recall notice for the airbags in her Camry. She assumed it was related to the Takata incident and immediately made an appointment to have it serviced. Turns out a Toyota storage facility had a spider problem and there were colonies of spiders living in the airbags waiting to be installed. The airbags were deploying inside of cars after installation because spiders were tripping the sensors.
I work as a postman. The amount of bloody registered letters requiring ID that was sent out over this clusterfeck was astounding. And so many of them would say something along the lines of either 'dammit, i thought it was fixed already' or occasionally 'I sold that bloody thing years ago'
I still get notices on a mercury’s front end corrosion recall when I sold the car like 8 years ago now… the thing is, I had an avenger with two major recalls that I never got a letter about, the mechanic just mentioned it in passing during an oil change lol. Wasnt even a dodge mechanic.
I used to be an engineer for a major airbag company, and I'm married to someone who used to work at Honda. I can tell you since 2008 engineers were quitting Takata in Michigan because of their extremely low standards of quality. They would test the same crappy design 10 times, it would fail 9 times but submit the 1 pass as the final result. What you need to understand is in Japan they have 'Keiretsu' where two companies will basically always give each other business. Takata is 'Keiretsu' with Honda. Regardless of their product, Honda would continue to buy it. Takata cared less and less about quality, so much that it was normalized to just make fake test reports for tests that were never performed. Again, Honda would buy them anyway. Finally, my wife told me that she witnessed an inflator go off in a technicians face when he was replacing the faulty airbag. they were basically extremely volatile bombs that got worse over time. there was blood everywhere. They paid off the injured employee to stay silent.
It's really paradoxical, this entire affair; usually Japanese cars (and, by inference, their components) are such high quality. I'm happy that Takata, in the end, got shafted out of business. Good riddance.
@@Mercurio2435 that's why you see class action lawyers soliciting their promises of a easy payday against companies who usually settle and consider whatever the amount just another business expense. but sometimes businesses fold from legal action unfairly look up the case of the gas can maker vs idiots catching fire by abusing the product sad story it's on UA-cam
@@mnxs Where a car comes from doesnt mean anything. Especially not nowadays. I hear that so often: Japanese cars are so reliable. Italian and British cars are not. Thats utter bullshit. They are all the same. All the companies try to safe cost. You cant simply have a car that is cheaper then the competitor, but at the same time it is of higher quality somehow. The only way this would be possible are lower wages in the manufacturer country. Japan is not a low income country (anymore). Thats why the South Koreans take their market positions (Kia and Hyundai). Over the last decade, I have seen so many cars from Japan with serious problems, like broken transmissions. Not only in the cheap cars, but also in the flagship vehicles. They are not alone: German cars, American cars, British cars, doesnt matter at all. There are no perfect vehicles. They always have something, at least minor defects or quality issues.
Im a technician at a JDM manufacturer. Still to this day we get cars in our shop that need the recall done. We get one in every couple days. Its downright scary how many vehicles this issue affected.
I bought a 2003 Toyota Corolla last year (250k+ km on the clock), the airbags have been replaced right after I bought it, the previous owner never complied with the recall order, basically he stated that he did not had the time for it. He then sold it to my garage/dealer who said, hey we have a nice used car (indeed it is a nice car, it's my third Corolla) for you, only one thing there is a recall for the airbags so we already made an appointment with a Toyota garage for it, that was around the corner for me and they took about two hours to complete the job. No time for it? Yeah sure, knowing now that previous owner surely did run the gauntlet with those faulty airbags.
My husband still hasn't had his done. He got the letters when he first had his STI, sold it, then ended up buying it back and he still gets postcards now and then. Meanwhile, I've driven a string of Fiats that were oddly unaffected 😅
Replaced the airbag in my 2010 Honda Accord a few days after they issued the recall. 3 weeks later I was in an accident where the airbag deployed. Car was totaled and I ended up buying a 2009 Mazda6. I then had to replace the airbag in that one too...
I just want to recommend “There Are No Accidents” by Jessie Singer. Brilliant book that investigates the negligence that allows tragedies like these to continue. The managers purposefully ignoring the engineers reminds me of the culture at Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas.
That's actually 2 pretty good examples, good on you my man! I've read both the book and about some of McDonell Douglas gross negligences a few years back, mainly the cargo door bursting open mid flight on the DC-10. Remember, gentlemen's agreement is synonymous to corruption.
This ,the Kobe Steel quality scandal and a few other Japanese industrial scandals all seemed to come out around the same time and could be some content on this channel someday too. They all basically had their roots in the lost decade, japanese corporate culture, and the loss of a quality focused company culture as well as a healthy amount of corruption and coverups
There's a reason Japanese companies now employ a "loud American" (not always Americans, but that's the stereotype) specifically to counter the cultural tendency to agree with their superiors.
@@PlainlyDifficult Don’t forget the scandal of the united states shipping the 9/11 steel off for recycling before properly analyzing it, and the whitewash report from NIST which ignored first responder reports of secondary explosions, and their persistent refusal to release the data behind their collapse model. They claim to do so would “jeopardize safety” yet they have not issued a single new directive regarding changes that should be made in current or new construction on the basis of their purported discovery of “a new type of fire-induced progressive collapse.” For more information I recommend the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization.
Lexus notified me of my faulty Takata airbag on the passenger side. I was advised not to use the front passenger seat at all until a replacement was installed. Problem is, that took like 8 months because they couldn't manufacture new airbags fast enough to fix all the recalls. In my case, it wasn't a huge inconvenience. But Lexus said that if I needed full use of the front seat, they would pay for a rental car for those 8 months. Can you image how much money that would cost multiplied over tens of thousands of car owners?
Luckily, Lexus probably has rental cars available directly to them so it isn't as much of a hit as to an individual. Still expensive though when you need thousands of cars on the road you can't sell as new.
@@reinbeers5322 I happen to know that Lexus was contracting with Enterprise Rent-a-Car for the rentals. I work for Enterprise, and I know that any car they provided me would not have been as nice as my own. :D
@@reinbeers5322 Putting wear and tear on new cars would significantly reduce their value since they would then be "used cars", and I don't know if they would have had that many new cars to provide. Rental fleets are already set up to shift cars from one location to another in large quantities on short notice.
My car was one of the ones recalled a couple of years ago. When the engineers opened it up to replace the bags, they discovered that following a previous accident, the disreputable mechanics had stuffed in the old air bags and cut the cable to them. It was still a potential death trap, but a different kind of deathtrap.
@@tomsoki5738 I know, but it was so long ago that I've no hope of finding the cowboys, much less bringing them to justice. It was in about 2010 that they did their work.
The saddest airbag story I ever heard was from a friend of a friend. She had her two year old daughter with her while she was out shopping. She wanted to keep the child safe while she loaded the groceries into the trunk, so she put her in the front seat, knowing she would put her in her car seat in the back after she was done with the groceries. As she is working at the back of the car, someone pulled into the parking space in front of hers and barely tapped her vehicle with their car. However, it was enough to activate the airbag, which went off and hit the little girl in the face, instantly breaking her neck and killing her. It's just something you never think about.
Thank you, you've saved my life. When you said Acura, my blood froze and my stomach turned. I searched my VIN on the NHTSA site, and yep, it's recalled. I've driven this thing almost 5 years, and my sister drove it for 6 years before that, all without knowing we were in a death trap. Thank goodness we never got in a crash. I'm still upset that the NADI inflator in my car was added to the recall nearly 3 years ago and neither of us got notified!
Early Jeep Libertys are worse, because the air bag can randomly inflate, even with no crash! And I don't know what Diamler Chrysler used for the air bag maufacturer.
@@Bonanzaking absolutely true, eff cars, I'd rather travel by train if it was available. Recalls are just really spooky to me and I did not expect to be affected, lol
You should put a 'Profitability' section at the end of each scandal episode. Like, how much did the company make out at the end of the day after paying off fines, lawyers, settlements, etc. Since shockingly often when corporations do shit like this, even if they get caught they wind up ahead after all the profit made before getting caught.
People say you can't put a price on a human life, but businesses, government, insurance companies, and courts do it every day. Two thumbs up for the Profitability section.
I have to admit that when I got the recall notice for my Accord, I didn’t take it that seriously. My wife, thank goodness, did. She had both airbags done promptly. Until this video, I didn’t realize how much danger there was. Thank you so much for doing this! Excellent content as usual.
Yeah, it took me at least a year to get the ignition fixed in my caddy after getting tons and tons of leaflets periodically. I guess the issue was, a heavy Keychain or other torque could just, kill the engine while driving.
I worked at a Mitsubishi dealership several years ago. One of only 2 in my city. We got a massive list of customers who had vehicles with Takata airbags. I was shocked at the amount of people who declined to have this recall done because they thought it was a marketing ploy to bring their car in and be upsold on services. Even after being told that it's free, and that it's a major safety recall, and that the dealership wouldn't look at anything else if they don't want it, and that it was absolutely FREE and their car would also get washed for free, some people outright refused. I thought they were crazy to do this. Hope they're ok and that these air bags didn't blow up on them.
My husband’s mother had a car with this type of airbag (they had the recall notice). They got in an accident while she was teaching him to drive (he panicked and floored the car into a tree, SpongeBob style), but the airbags in the car didn’t go off at all. Terrifying to think that the airbags for that specific car being faulty in a completely different way probably saved their lives.
I attended a crash recently (as an emergency services volunteer) where a young man had his legs on the dash of the car he was the passenger in. No seatbelt was worn either. The car had come to a sudden stop from around 80-100km/h, front on, into a rather large tree. The force of the impact and the airbag going off combined to eject him completely over the top of his seat's backrest and into the back bench seat of the car. Needless to say, the human body was not designed the endure such sudden direction change forces, and he suffered the agony of pretty much everything below and including his pelvis being... not as straight as it was before the incident. Many things were broken. I do hope he's recovered, but it would be a long road back to normal after that. Airbags are a great thing when used as designed, but for god's sake keep your feet off the dash!
I recall a video a while ago where someone suddenly stopped their car and the passenger had their legs up on the dash and no seatbelt on slid down into the legroom space butt first. I think they were panicked and uncomfortable, but with little to no flexibility that could be some serious pain - it may have though and the panic and adrenaline maybe masked it.
@@David-gk2ml It didn't show her getting back up into the seat so I imagine they had to pull over or park somewhere so they could get her door open and hopefully (and awkwardly) slide out of the car. Otherwise that would've taken some good arm muscle maybe, but yeah really awkward position to escape from the looks of it.
I've heard of legs up on the dash, airbag goes off, sending knee caps into eye sockets. I feel like telling people this when I see them with legs up on dash.
This recall saved my life. I remember getting the letter when this all came out. Got my 2005 Honda's airbags replaced. It's a good thing I did, because 9 months ago, I was in a bad accident and the airbags went off. 😐 Luckily I'm just fine, so was my unborn daughter. I'm sure the airbags saved me from further injury, or death.
You are very lucky, my 2004 Nissan Sentra just last year(2021) was in an accident; Even replacing the airbags within the later recall(After Honda was expanded upon) resulted in a deployment of airbags exploding beyond what they should, I'm glad your car was fixed properly!
Good grief, that would be absolutely terrifying getting into an accident like that, and chilling knowing it could have been even worse. Glad to hear you and your baby are okay, I hope everything goes smoothly with the pregnancy.
Had these airbags on 2011 Silverado not only was the airbags recalled but so were the airbag sensors on my truck. Not only was it a claymore but it was an overly sensitive claymore!
I don't trust my airbags at all. They're disabled until I find a dummy plug for the crash sensor, then my car will probably be a few pounds lighter. I plan on using something that is soft enough to prevent brain damage & letting momentum run its course instead of making something to counteract momentum, which will theoretically make damage to the body's internals less likely & less severe. I prefer using foam padding, but it has to be thick enough to better disperse energy & slow down momentum. My goal would be for the impact to be good for freeway speed impacts.
@@KrazyKeith4 In case you are serious and not joking: You obviously aren't going to be able to have a large enough foam pad infront of you to work better than an airbag and still see something out of the car while driving. I think you don't understand the forces involved when your 5kg head is travelling even just 60km/h and the car suddenly stops. It is something in the magnitude of dropping a bowling ball from 15m, do you think some piece of foam will do anything to protect from those forces?
After the wreck, the police officer told me that I was lucky the airbags hadn't come out, because I'd be dead or badly injured. Looking forward to the new Scandal series. Thank you, Plainly!
This one was huge, advertising on the TV even to remind people to check if they were effected here in Australia. Someone else might be able to corroborate this but I'm sure they were even playing the advert to check if your car was effected while you waited for the film to start in the cinema? Vague memory of it but might be mistaken... Now you've done this you'll be hounded to do the emissions cheating scandal
Yes, I remember this because they wanted them all replaced by a certain date? I bought my car new and it had these airbags. The dealership sent me letters and then ended up calling me to get it done because I was lazy and left it untill the last minute ☹
Tell me about it!! I used to think those VW diesels were a true feat of modern engineering. Turns out, it's just easier to lie and cheat than it is to make a clean diesel. *Sigh*
I can say you are correct it did appear in some preroll for the cinema, was on some free to air ads. And on normally a printed out piece or paper/poster in mechanic workshops. Source, I was a mechanic around that time and that whole thing was a nightmare to deal with.
I was working for a Ford/Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership when this recall was going on. We had calls DAILY from people furious at how, not only was there shrapnel in their airbags, but the parts required to perform the recall were on back order for MONTHS!! What a mess! Plus, depending on what car you had, it could take anywhere from an hour to a day and a half to perform the repair. So naturally, some car owners were waiting FAR longer than others to get this fixed, and were very bothered by this. I didn’t blame them - I couldn’t get my Takata recall done for over a year! What a time!
What when? It's still going on. I bought old 2008 Ford Mondeo and after few years of ownership, just few months ago I got letter from Ford that you're car has Takata airbag and they urge to go to stealership for free change of unit.
@@jothain I guess I should say, the first couple of years that recall mailers were going out in the US. I haven’t worked in the auto industry since, so I hadn’t thought about it ever since I got my recall done. :)
This issue affects me personally, since my grandpa worked at a takata manufacturing plant for many years which shut down after the recall. He always complained about the outsourcing and declining quality of takata products; corporate greed ruining things once again.
Can you really complain about outsourcing in relation to any of this? It was a deliberate and negligent design decision made at the highest levels of the company.
@@dragonkingf3 Absolutely. In fact, at that time... I serviced the machinery in a shop in California that made the nozzles for the airbag inflators Takata used in their products. The shop had GOOD standards and kept up high quality control as a matter of pride.. up until the moment they got a phone call and Takata canceled their contract immediately. I know for a fact that the parts leaving the shop were in spec and well made. They were not paid for the last shipment of parts either. Those little nozzles, about the size of a 25 cent piece and about 3/8" tall were shipped out weekly in 55 gallon drums, many drums at a time. 180 people were suddenly unemployed. They came to work.. and the doors were "locked". The owners of the company nearly bankrupted themselves making sure everyone of their employees was paid. The owners were very very nice and decent people and took a huge personal hit to take care of their employees. I was an outside vendor but they took care of me as well. They were making parts to spec and shipping them on time. Takata screwed them blind. Company name = Multiscrew Manufacturing IRRC. La Habra, California. Thanks for the video. Id almost forgotten this.
@@iusethisnameformygoogleacc1013 yeah, I have limited chemistry knowledge, but when I heard Ammonium Nitrate.... like wtf??? Why didn't any of the engineers report this insanity?
@@corneliusthecrowtamer1937 My first thought was, isn't that what Timothy McVeigh used to blow up that building in Oklahoma City? That seems a little too explody to me. The engineers did know and kept their mouths shut. Where is a good whistler blower when you need one?
I saw the recall letter and called my nearest Honda dealership in London, UK, to arrange to replace it. They were amazingly laid back about it. Around 3 months later I finally booked it in and spent half a day getting it sorted. That was a year before it prooved to be a good idea to have sorted it The front passenger wheel wobbled then fell to a stop under the car. It happened to be the first time I had ever placed my toy sized pooch on the front seat next to me. The passenger airbag went off, making me jump out of the car in shock. I ran around the front to see what had happened. When I walked back to the front seat I looked over to see my pooch sitting and staring wide eyed at me with a shower of white dust snowing down on him. Poor love! Thank goodness I followed up on the recall.
23:56 Ah, now we see the problem. The Takata employees were probably using the strangely anatomically correct "crash test" dummies for something other than their intended purpose.
Its always great when they put the spark plugs right where you can't get to them without disassembling half the front end. The point still stands however. Doing your own work on your own vehicle is super important.
@@sammorris2721 : Because of a tumor i had to give my beloved Grand Cherokee to a "mechanic" .... was running like a rubber ball when getting it back ... 5 WRONG (short) spark plugs ! NEVER AGAIN !
Scandal Scale idea: 1-10, 1 being an accident, company taking responsibility and action before gov, etc. and 10 being completly illegal and endangering the lives of a significant amount, like state wide or country wide depending on where it takes place
Or a scale 1-10 with four factors considered Risk of injury/death Companies knowledge of issue Companies actions to mitigate injury/death Companies actions to hide issue
IMO the archetypal 10 would be something like the Rosenberg spy ring that allowed the Soviets to get the bomb. Seismic event that shook up the world order to the core.
This might sound silly, but I would be super interested in a series about stairwell collapses. Ever since going up some pretty sketchy stairs in Rome it's been something I've wondered about. Love the content!
Out of all the major recalls this is one of the most horrifying ones. Product safety is very important and shouldn't be taken lightly. The fact it's an airbag which is meant to keep you safe is even worse.
If I remember correctly, the only reason this was associated with hobda so heavily is that they were the first to be transparent about the problem. Other manufacturers (including American ones) were also using them, and either weren't aware, ignored the problem, or were quietly phasing out the Takata brand air bags. So honda is not the devil here.
Honda isn’t as bad as Takata, but they certainly played a role in the amount of time it took for the issue to be identified. Settling out of court to avoid scrutiny from regulators was pretty shady.
My son was killed in a single auto accident involving a Ford Explorer, his airbag did not deploy, he was just 2 miles from home. Residents of Alaska could not b part of the class action lawsuit due to Alaska having one of the strictest torte reform laws around. Torte reform laws were ironically passed thru legislation & made law thru with heavy influence & support of Torte reform by my deceased son's paternal family; an aunt whom was a senator, her senator husband from another district and her Dr father. There's so much that hurts about this. Unintended consequences. Torte reform keeps any legal award under $50k so no lawyer in Alaska will do these kind of cases. This huge gaping hole left by my son's premature demise will never b filled nor will these mfs have accountability in the state of Alaska. It's been over 3 years since he died, alone, airbags failed to deploy and his body nor vehicle wasn't found until 'curfew' streets lights were turned back on hours later. He deserves better, so much better.
I did a paper on this in college. I found that the defective airbags mostly came from a manufacturing plant that was contracted out by TK Holdings, Inc. in South America. A faulty piece of equipment, coupled with the explosives, bad canister designs, and environmental factors; it led to this clusterfuck of a nightmare. Not to mention the damn company being corrupt as hell and no one really knowing what was going on
@@bltzcstrnx You'd think. But as OP said. The company was corrupt. They probably contracted the factory for cheap and didn't care if people got hurt as long as they got as much money as possible. Funnily enough that tends to lead to problems with the product, which can get a company shut down if it's bad enough.
I still remember the day during an English lesson I had with a student while living in Japan, around 2015. It was our first lesson and he wanted to practice an English job interview. Once done, I asked him who he worked for and why he wanted to practice interview. After some prodding, he finally revealed he just quit Takata that day and wanted to completely forget working for that company. Some of the things he told me were quite a surprise considering this was a Japanese company. I read up on the company that night and yeah, I couldn't believe how this company managed to survive for so long.
Ashley, the second name on the list was such a said story. Hers was a slow speed collusion, her teacher had actually hit her (very VERY VERY SLOW SPEED. CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH). She was pulling out of the parking lot of her high school, and her teacher and her hit. It was such a terrible experience, for the family first and foremost, and for everyone around (school had just released.)
Ashley Parham, right? Hers is such a tragic tale, especially since her younger brother was in the car, so he watched the entire thing happen firsthand... Which is definitely going to give you some issues I'd imagine.
I worked at a Chevy dealer in the early 2000's and was a specialist in electrical systems. Did the brief training in SRS, and replaced several airbags and seatbelt retractors under very limited number of recalls before the big Takata story. I think starting in 2003 there was recalls regarding airbags and seatbelt retractors either failing to deploy or releasing hot gas from airbag ripping mid deployment. Cant remember the brand, but I'd bet Takata. An extra fun detail, normally you have to ship back the recalled parts to the manufacture with the paperwork from that vehicle (not cheap shipping because its a hazard). About 6 months into the recall, they longer wanted them back, so they refused to pay for shipping. Leaving the dealership holding the bag, because altho discharge is very unlikely without an electric spark, its reckless to toss them in the trash armed. The fun part was taking them outback and setting them off, uh I mean, rendering them safe to dispose of. After much scientific testing, you can rocket milk crates and road cones well over 20' into the air. Of course we used a very long wire set to set them off. Every 6 months the dealership would have "customer days" inviting people to come by and look at new cars, the service area, new features and safety features. They only made me put on a show 1 once. They wanted me to show customers what happens in an accident. Well mostly old people showed up. First I talked about how the sensors worked and what the minimums were for deployment. Next I setoff the seatbelt retractor, helping to restrain a person in their seat. And finally setting off an airbag setup on a stand. The crowd of 20 or so senior citizens gasped and yelled in shock. One gal turned ghost white and leaned onto her husband. They all started freaking out, asking if their cars had these horrible devices. I had done too good of a job it seems, not thinking that these people had no idea what an airbag really was or what it looks like not in some slow motion video without sound. After spending the rest of the show trying to calm people down, my boss came out and let me know I wouldn't need to worry about doing another show ever again.
This story is a microcosm of why the US is such a laughing stock tragedy right now. You demonstrated how the safety features of how a car’s SRS system works and not only did the women recoil, their men also winced like sheltered children. These kind of people would reject bandaids because removing them would temporarily hurt 🤦🏽♂️ the sound of an exploding airbag triggers them. At this point China can take over the US with a wheel barrel full of Takata airbags 🤦🏽♂️
You really need to combine that with a crash where you show a crash test dummy being thrown through the wind shield. The the air bag is the less scary option. Cars are inherently lethal (not just dangerous) and it would be nice if people had more respect for those dangers.
Great story. I crashed a Porche Carrera 4 into a heavy truck at 60mph. The airbags were true luxery and deployed so briefly. No injuries whatsoever. Not what I was expecting. Thankyou airbags.
As someone with an interest in energetic chemistry, it's kind of wild to realise that there's millions and millions of cars driving about the planet with little canisters of sodium azide or nitrotetrazole inside, or possibly the same compound that leveled a large portion of Beirut. The fact that Takata "improved" their occupant safety product with a propellant based on an industrial-grade blasting agent/fertiliser that was known to suffer from environmental degradation is totally crazy.
Sigh. Two replies, and they're both restating points that were either explained in the video or mentioned in my comment. Not really the kind of interesting discussion I was hoping for, but oh well. 😆
This world is rapidly passing away and I hope that you repent and take time to change before all out disaster occurs! Belief in messiah alone is not enough to grant you salvation - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36) if you believed in Messiah you would be following His commands as best as you could. If you are not a follower of Messiah I would highly recommend becoming one. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life - Revelation 3:20. Contemplate how the Roman Empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. Revelation 17 confirms that it is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years going back to Babylon and before, C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate once you start a relationship with God. Can't get a response from God? Fasting can help increase your perception and prayer can help initiate events. God will ignore you if your prayer does not align with His purpose (James 4:3) or if you are approaching Him when "unclean" (Isaiah 1:15, Isaiah 59:2, Micah 3:4). Stop eating food sacrificed to idols (McDonald's, Wendy's etc) stop glorifying yourself on social media or making other images of yourself (Second Commandment), stop gossiping about other people, stop watching obscene content etc. Have a blessed day!
This recall is the reason airbags have always, and still do, make me feel uneasy. I know they generally increase your chances of survival but they've always been one of those slightly terrifying things you just have to accept as part of modern life.
These types will always feel invisible, even if a fork was mounted on the wheel pointed at their chests. Football players tended to do this too with improved helmets, using it as a weapon and impact point. Then it turned out this behavior was very harmful to everyone involved.
I was in a pretty severe accident about 10 years ago and the airbag injuries were insane. My eyebrows were burnt off of my forehead at the middle, my nose was broken and I had deep abrasions to my cheek and upper lip. Even my two front teeth hurt. On the way to the hospital, the emt told me that the airbag had fucked me up but that if I had hit a regular steering wheel, I'd have probably died from head trauma. (I am very short so the steering would have hit me hard in the mid face) My left eyebrow has never been the same ever since lol but I am glad to be alive.
When my car was recalled for the airbag, Honda said it would take months to get the parts. They were nice enough to have the car towed to the dealership and set me up with an enterprise rental car for 5 months. It was a really nice rental car too. I can only imagine how much that cost them.
You got a rental?! I waited SIX MONTHS for parts for my Civic, and they let me drive it the whole time... And here I was just annoyed that my mom only had to wait a week for her Accord to get fixed...
Months, wow, glad I didn't take mine in. Fuse is easy enough to pull. Maybe the dealer will find the part they need and let me bring it in once it arrives.
This video caught my attention because I've worked in the salvage industry for 10 years now and fairly frequently we have companies come out to replace Takata airbags. Doesn't matter if they are deployed or not. It's going to be an ongoing thing for a very long time I think.
Yes because there are alot of early 2000s vehicles still on. The road and especially reliable Honda's Takata airbags could still be a problem in 20 years in used cars
I ignored these letters for like 3 years but they kept sending them to me. Then one day I researched what happens and when I saw hospital photos of what happens when the airbags fail I immediately called the dealer ang got my airbags replaced. Damn those photos were scary. One poor guy had his eye gouged out from the metal shooting out.
yes I just read the descriptions of the injuries.. I didn't even look at the pictures.. seems most of the deaths were just bled to death in minutes... horrifying
When they fail it is literally a grenade in your steering wheel. We talk about car parts grenading themselves, but this is the first time I've ever seen that term used accurately.
@@l.2620 to be fair, the letter doesn’t say “there’s a bomb in your car”. I also ignored the letter for a while when I had a Honda Civic because they didn’t really state how serious it was. I only got my airbag replaced when I went in for another issue and they did it without me requesting it.
I used to work at a Honda dealership in the U.S. and we had to replace takata airbags on cars from 2001 and up all for free. It still surprised me when I saw cars that had 200k on them roll in for the recall. The technicians that did them would blow up the old Takata air bags for fun every once and a while. Sounded like a gunshot lol
We only blow up the non recall ones. Getting one to launch in the air is the best part. Obviously in an open area and triggered from a distance for basic safety reasons.
Yup, fun thing to do waiting for jobs to come in, either pop air bags or fill bin liners with oxy-acetylene and touch them off. Back then i wondered why some of those JDM bags went off so much more violently than others.
Had one go off (no shrapnel) in a front end collision back in 08 and it was like a grenade went off in the car. Absolutely unreal. Burned the skin off my arms where I was holding the wheel and some of my passengers nose. Also blew the bottom half of the front windshield glass out. Could barely hear anything for days.
It's crazy that you posted this recently, as my girlfriend just received a notice in the mail saying that her 2006 bmw has the same slight issue of having an improvised shrapnel bomb as an airbag. What's worse though is that the manufacturer or dealer took this long to finally let her know, surely they've know and just took their sweet time.
I have one for my 2007 mondeo that I've had "on hold" for a while. I read some comments and they say some were replaced with other Takata airbags, its just the lifespan that gets them recalled. Either way, I'm making the call monday.
Working as a Toyota Mechanic and we're still seeing these airbags getting replaced once in a while. It's mostly people who ignored the recall notices but showed up years later for some other reason. I was pretty impressed with the actual rollout of the recall though. Back when we started receiving the replacements we did dozens a day, which was impressive as only specially trained mechanics were allowed to do the work. Seemed like it was about only a month or two before we had everyone upgraded to the new ones. Went really smooth.
This recall potentially saved my life, or at least prevented injury. My dad had a 2008 Subaru Outback that was listed as a car that may have the affected airbags, so we got them replaced at a dealership. Fast forward 6 years and I was in a front corner collision that set off the steering airbag. I actually was unharmed, and never touched the airbag due to the angle of the crash, but it would have sent shrapnel into my face if it was one of the defective ones. Edit: it was probably closer to 2015 rather than 2011
Yeah, especially giving the long period of time after the compound could have definitely had at least some adverse effect given all that time to collect moisture with no agent inside to stop the change within the compound
@@MartianV2GG I live in a very humid area that can go from 25-50°F in less than a week during the autumn and spring months, so corrosion is a real problem with anything metal.
I had a 8th gen Honda Civic and around 2016 it was recalled for a Takata airbag. The recall was didn’t say “Your car is fucked, luv Honda” but I wish it did 😂
I always struggle with this. Yes the fine destroyed the company, but the people responsible probably just joined other car manufacturers. I honestly think that the CEO's and board should have to go to prison for murder. Never to come out. They knew it was dangerous and installed it anyway to make money. Rich people need to be held to account even more then poor people if only to show faith in the justice system.
Punishing people based on being ticher or poorer (aka their status) instead of their actual crime is how you lose further trust in the justice system as that is a perversion of justice.
@@D-Havoc ok, so is a poor person stealing from a large grocery chain just as bad as that grocery chain embezzeling funds and putting people in danger for money? the more money you have, the more power and responsibility you have. the justice system should reflect that.
@@DaveSmith-v3tThat’s because evidence was collected illegally. That’s literally the system working as intended. If you want to bring up an example of someone getting off on an actual technicality, talk about the guy who proved he was innocent of the crime that got him locked up for decades with new DNA evidence. He used up all his appeals by the time he proved it so the SCOTUS ruled he must stay in prison. This is more of someone getting ON, on a technicality, though.
@@hotpocketsat2am🎉🎉🎉 well said, I have an uncle who worked in finance for 40 years and he believes businesses are unfairly treated by our judicial system. Companies usually aren’t punished enough.
Yeah, as soon as I heard the names of literally every chemical used for airbags I immediately appreciated the problem. They're all explosives, but as you go down the list it changes from "something close to something you might blow a hole in a can with in a home lab" to "the cheapest and most common explosive on the planet"
I had a Honda Civic 2006 in Brazil and they did a recall for both airbags as well. I had no idea it was such a big scandal, thanks for the great video as always.
The airbags on my Toyota Corolla had been “fixed” 6 times in the 3 years I had the car. 4 times for the passenger side, 2 times for the driver’s steering wheel. The fact that they couldn’t even get the recall replacements done correctly baffles me even further, and understandably exacerbates the cost on Takata.
The airbags in my Accord were replaced under recall twice, with the apparent explanation being that the original faulty airbags degraded over time, so the first replacement was to replace "old" airbags with new ones that still had a flawed design but being new, were not yet degraded, before later replacing the replacement with an airbag that didn't have the flawed design.
Had a friend back in 2009 with a 2007 corolla that was involved in her getting rear-ended at a red-light and the bags went off without much of a hitch, the rear of the car was only slightly dented but the dealership that she bought it from refused to give her service or replace the airbags until she threated to sue. After that they had given her faulty takata airbags from I'm guessing another car, three weeks later she's at a red-light and gets rear-ended again by some kid only for the airbag to send fragments of metal clear across her temple and slice up her left ear, she tried to sue the brat's parents, toyota, and takata for the medical expenses but got told to pound sand on all three cases. When the recall in 2013 happened, she got told to pound sand yet again when trying to get compensation from toyota since they told her that she was living on the edge of a "zone B area" and had expected the airbags to last between 10-15 years before degrading, and that they weren't going to do anything about it. Needless to say, she's blacklisted both her kids from ever getting into a toyota after what happened to her and I think her dad winded up getting a few of his co-workers to sell theirs after the 2013 recall.
@@zeldazackman Insurers typically total (write off) any car where the airbags have deployed, so there is something very off about your friend's story, and that would explain why the dealer didn't want to replace the deployed airbags ... that just isn't usual after a car has been in any accident where the airbags have deployed.
I used to work at a trucking company that transported these recalled airbags. You would not believe how many pallets of these I saw. We would sometimes just throw them in the trailer because the pallets would fall apart from having hundreds of them on each other and just straight up collapsing. Started working there mid 2017 in the height of everything
Hey John! Having owned a 2014 Toyota Corolla, living in Miami, and learning that the Takata airbag possibly affected my vehicle, I was ready to rush to Toyota to have my airbags switched. But thankfully my year/model of car wasn't included in the recall. P.S. - In looking at the list of fatalities, there was someone who died in June 2016 who lived in Hialeah, FL, which is about 20 minutes from where I live. Yikes.
yep my mom has the same type of car and we live in central FL. Her model was older though nd was affected i think so she sent it in. it worked out though because they kept it for like a year and gave us a free rental car to drive that was way nicer lol. Whats kind of crazy is we actually did get into a horrible wreck with that rental car, and if that had been the corolla we could have died.
My previous car, a 2002 Honda Accord, was part of that airbag recall. I took care of it promptly, because I don't fancy shrapnel to the face. Some years later, I got another notice. I thought it was a mistake, but it turned out the replacement airbag was of the same type. The second replacement lasted me until the car finally died in 2020, with no additional recalls, so that one must have been a different airbag assembly.
They informed me at a dealer that the replacements were stopgaps. The airbag assembly is safe but only for a period of a few years. I had it replaced twice. The 2nd fix was supposed to be the final fix.
@@Chironex_Fleckeri Honda: "Remember when we removed that frag grenade from your steering column? Yea...about that...we replaced it with another frag grenade." Me: "Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!" 😳 "Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!"
I was building airbags when this happened, you will be happy to know that other companies took this extremely seriously and went threw every step to prevent this or other safety issues.
I actually had a vehicle that had one of these airbags in it. It was on my Nissan Sentra. I was contacted for several months about having them replaced by the dealer. I finally got a chance to get up to the dealer, and just a WEEK later, I got into an accident on a rural road at night where I hit three cows that were scattered across a road. My airbags deployed. Had I not had them replaced, I could've been seriously hurt. It was scary how close the events took place. Good video, Plainly Difficult.
This is wild and I literally knew nothing about it, I got a recall notice in the mail shortly after getting my 2007 Mazda6 around 2016. Took it to the dealership and had it fixed(?) no problem. I spun off the road a few years later and crashed in a field and the airbags didn’t even deploy. I guess I prefer that to dying in a car bomb explosion 😂
The front airbags will only deploy in a frontal collision with forces made in a 30+mph impact (roughly) Such as rear ending the car in front or head on collision. For the t bone crash if side airbags were fitted they should have deployed.
I worked for Honda NZ while I was still in highschool and sorting through thousands of these airbags to send back to Japan. Can still remember alot of the serial numbers for each type of airbag recalled. Had no idea how widespread the problem was at the time. Great video 👍
Great video. I'm an auto tech at a Lincoln (Ford) dealer and here in 2022 I'm still replacing several Takata airbags a week. Pays the bills. Love to see this content on your channel which I usually follow for environmental disasters. Also love to see a fellow ScanGuageII user! Great devices!
I was working in Honda's Swindon plant purchasing office when this kicked off. I knew the purchasing team managing Takata, and it was a regular topic in meetings. Everyone at Honda was taking it super seriously, there weren't even jokes about it like you would normally get if someone made a mistake. I think a lot of us were shocked and worried about how it could happen as everything safety wise was tested in full scale crash tests multiple times during the vehicle development, including climatic stuff. I remember the general comments around how difficult it was to understand exactly what was going on at Takata at the time. When all this first started Honda genuinely believed it was a small batch of manufacturing defects - we genuinely had no idea, and we used to audit the supplier plants reasonably regularly. You mention in the video how this sunk Takata, but at that point the OEM's were also seriously concerned it could sink them too. The recalls cost billions. Ironically an airbag had never been proven to actually save anyone's life at the time, and it was considered if maybe even removing them completely would have been safer...
Here in Brazil Honda used to deactivate the affected airbags until they had the parts to do the recall. My friend's mother's Civic went to dealer an astonishing 4 times to do the recall!! Then he learned it was because wires were doomed to be cut because other nations were a priority.
That can't be right. I had air bags in my 1997 Accord. This is around my car that's a 2009. Dodge Challenger. More expensive cars would have had them first, like BMW or Saab.
I had a car accident not to long ago and my airbag didn't deploy I got out my car the same way I came in with my front all screwed up and the rest of the car perfectly fine. So it's better to not have a airbag deployed.
No1 was making jokes cuz this ain't the 1980s where you're working in a frat house . No more cracking beers on Fridays and calling in a stripper for Todd's 69th birthday. If Sally in marketing overheard ( which lets be honest shes the company eavesdropper) then you know she'll tell on the lot, eventually making its way to the ear of none other than Mr. Honda himself.
Back in 2016, Honda Malaysia decided to issue letters to owners. I was one of the small-time employees on short contract to prep the letter. It took them 6 years to issue a recall in Malaysia. Even then, customers had to wait months
Oh dear gods. THIS. This is one of the recalls that bent over damn near every manufacturer out there. Im a former Chrysler tech in Canada, i did an absolute assload of recalls; though i was out just before this one really hit. Your description of the airbag system is on point; its also why people should never put *anything* on steering wheels or other components marked airbag, elsewise you turn them into Claymore mines. These airbags are also an example of when cars get more complicated, more faults appear. My 13 Jeep JKUR didnt get hit with that specific recall, but my family members did - with their permission/informed consent i disabled the airbag system altogether until the fault was repaired at the dealership. Perhaps not 'ideal' but ill take disabling a potential bomb over not, anyday. Good idea for a series! Just the auto sector alone could keep you going for decades.
Your comment reminded me of "just rolled in" channel where someone had glued pretty much the entire interior full of those plastic decoration gems. Yes including steering wheel and car had come for airbag recall. I just wondered what the driver would look like after airbag would deploy on that car. Likely blind, swallow bunch of them and maybe even nostrils filled with those 😂 The amount of insanity people do to their cars 🙄
I cannot imagine working in distribution or sales and having to deal with something like this, the amount of headaches a major recall would give you lmao.
@@Notmyname1593 This here. Anyone with an even remotely dangerous hobby knows that when it comes to safety, you get what you pay for. Industrial strength cost cutting like this is dangerous and immoral.
Not a mistake. Deliberate decision. They knew; they hid the problem. It's not like other choices in propellant weren't available; they went cheap, and *stayed* cheap once they knew it was problematic.
I like this new series! You can keep quite busy with only automotive scandals. Like the Suzuki samurai scandal. I owned two of them and never tipped mine over, or ever came close. If you watched the 60 minutes report, you could become convinced that a mouse fart from 50 feet away might tip the thing over! Many experts said that the "rollover simulation rig" that they bolted to it made the vehicle unstable, leading to the dramatic "rollover" footage. I would love to see what you could dig up on this subject. Keep up the great work!!!
I was unaware of a 60 Minutes report on the Samurai. But the most commonly known hit piece from Consumer Reports/Consumer Union was completely staged. Someone who hasn't even a normal track/test driver had to get in and be erratic as hell with wheel inputs to the the Samurai on two wheels. It was actually one of the most stable vehicles tested despite being on of the narrowest and tallest vehicles tested. There's a video here on UA-cam with the evidence under the name Suzuki v. Consumers Union. They also tried to do the same with Isuzu a few years later and there's a similar video for that one.
My SIL had one. They loved it, and she opined that part of the problem was behind the steering wheel - people who should never have gone off-roading thought they knew what they were doing.
@@WatanabeNoTsuna. not even close, in fact GM sued the piss out of Dateline/NBC over their staged report on the Square body Chevy trucks with saddle tanks
The Takata reca is still ongoing here and they ran out of replacements at one point so they were replacing the old Takatas with new Takatas that will still need to be replaced again, but at least the newer ones are less likely to fail since age is a factor, but they still need to be replaced again so those vehicles are marked as not having a complete recall performed.
@@everythingpony Ikr! They're alright when they're new but they have a high failure rate when they reach a certain age, so they just put a newer one in and recall the vehicle again once the new bag gets towards the failure age 🙃
The money game, and blaming game happens all to much. Being an ex Radio Shack manager, I trusted no employer and recorded all work days regardless. I was actually the first to expose Tandy with their unemployment fraud years ago. Watching my district manager getting handcuffed and arrested for tampering with payroll, still puts a smile on me, years later. A contractor I worked for, cut costs and even modified tests so what failed wouldn't show up, and the blame game resulted in technicians being fired to demonstrate the company took action, then hired back after said contract ended. I was one of them that was a lead technician but instead of returning, made the company pay for my new college courses so I could work for better paying companies, and never return to that hire fire rehire nightmare. Wasn't hard to do once I played the recordings and gave copies of all my projects. I copied all work, and the presidents of the companies signature on them, opened their eyes that I wasn't going to be used as a pawn for their blame games. Most of that companies plants are closed today, and only one seems to exist now. Karma served.
Literally turning your steering wheel into a claymore mine on impact - unbelievable not a single engineer/chemist didn't foresee this. Ammonium nitrate is probably the most well understood explosive in use today due to the shear volumes of it that are used globally.
This is a unique topic, and I think a great direction for an offshoot of Plane Difficult. I made a suggestion for an episode on the OdWalla apple juice recall due to an e-coli breakout that killed several children. The military had looked to give them a contract, but their tests showed an extremely high bacterial count which the company didn't address until the children became seriously ill.
Waiting for the inevitable should be criminal. If corporations are people for political donation purposes. They she be able to go to prison as well. If there's a couple people who would be held accountable in every case, I expect people in that position wouldn't go along to get along or overlook corruption
My senior in my college was one of the victims that are fatally wounded from the said faulty airbag. It happened during the recall time and she haven't send her Honda City for the replacement and got into the accident. The airbag propelled too hard it snapped her neck, instantly ended her life. Such an unfortunate event.
I actually used to work at one of the companies making airbag inflators for Honda some time after the recall and they talked briefly about Takata during orientation. I hated that job so much, but no matter how fed up I was I NEVER even thought about turning a blind eye when it came to quality! It's just not right!! I have no idea how these people at Takata could just not care 😔
the japanese work environment encourages things like this because arguing with those up top is discouraged even if they're wrong and miscommunication is quite an issue they don't even teach about their role in ww2 because saving face is so important.
Just a theory, but the more sociopathic you are, the more likely you are to reach positions of control and power. The human race is often destined to be ruled by its worst.
I have two anecdotes to share about my Takada recalls! My 2001 Mercedes SLK had its airbag replaced before I bought it in 2017, but the airbag is the whole-ass center of the steering wheel and it's obviously not a steering wheel shape they make any more. When I saw the recall sticker I thought, "did they remanufacture old ones or did they dust off the original molds and make new ones?" It's my understanding that supply issues for replacements have held up many recalls, obviously not helped by the fact the manufacturer declared bankruptcy. Story #2: In 2019 I bought a used 2011 Mercedes GLK from a Mercedes dealership. Interestingly, not only had the previous owner not replaced the defective airbag, but it didn't occur to the dealer to check for recalls BEFORE putting the car up for sale, so they sold it to me with a defective airbag. I only found out it still needed the recall when I brought the vehicle in for service and they did a standard check for recalls.
I was t-boned in my dad's Honda Ridgeline (my Accord was in pieces in the driveway at the time) the side curtains and the main airbags went off. None of it touched me. This was before we got the truck in for the recall. I feel beyond lucky that I was uninjured (plus the guy who hit me was an unlicensed driver, so the cops had a field day with him especially after he pretended he couldn't understand English when the police showed up)
The cost of the recall was compounded by the fact that Takata (or at least the Infinitis that I work on) had begun replacing them early. They began replacing the oldest units on the road with new units of the defective design just to minimize the risk of fatality, until an updated part was released. There were so many M35 and FX35 vehicles that got Takata recalls done twice.
" Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. " - That Fight club quote never gets old...
I don't believe I've mentioned recently that I absolutely love your sense of humour and how you make all of your videos funny enough to stick out inside my head while informative enough for me to remember what the video was actually about. Your narration style is 10/10 and I really enjoy your videos :)
As for ANY recall for ANY product (especially more dangerous machines like road cars and heavy equipment), people should check if their product is affected and attempt repairs, whether DIY or the proper method of returning for maintenance, of the affected part. Yet so many people in the US just throw away the big, red "URGENT RECALL" letters under the premise "I'm not letting a stealership touch my car!" or "I don't care if that breaks!". Bruh. The airbags are extra splody and can be accidentally set off. In the case of my Mazda, the fuel pump rings have had reports of leaking fuel. There have been a few reports of fires, but mostly just customers claiming smelling fuel from the cabin or having emmisions codes thrown for vacuum leaks in the fuel tank.
Being so young, I knew of the takata recall. It was just a nostalgic news story until I was reading the requirements of my driving test. My car couldn't be subject to recall, and especially not the takarta airbag recall. Thankfully it doesn't seem like takata airbags were ever fitted in my car. But it hit me then how serious this must have been for it to be a specifically named requirement. Looking a bit now I realise so many people have just not had it fixed. Idk I wouldn't like to be driving around with a weapon ik my car. Seems that now in 2022 Australian states are cancelling vehicle registrations that have not provided proof of replacement.
I experienced this with my 2012 Honda Jazz. First the driver’s side airbag, then some time later the passenger’s. I uploaded a scanned copy of the letter to Twitter and still have the originals, because it was hard to believe what I was reading. The disasters that could happen to me if they airbag deployed sounded like an April Fool.
a friend i had growing up died recently from a takata airbag incident, the civic his dad gave him got recalled but they never had it fixed, so its great to see a video explaining this thing in full.. thanks
Considering the amount of disasters concerning ammonium nitrate in history, the ones in charge must have been real sociopathic on top of worrying about profit margins to use that chemical for these "hand grenade bags".
As someone who works at a GM dealership it almost feels like this recall will go on and on and on. 07-13 Chevy Silverado Tahoe Suburban / GMC Sierra Yukon / Cadillac Escalade have the recalled Takata airbags on the passenger side and I've lost count how many inflators I've replaced in the last few years and the number of them rolling in the shop regularly doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon. On a sidenote GM has also just issued a new recall on certain 14+ trucks for the roof airbags, IDK the manufacturer but I think they too have a habit of exploding.
Now if only they would recall those same trucks as well as the Yukon/Yukon XL, Tahoe Escalade/Escalade ESV and Suburban for the cracked dashboards that usually starts at the top left corner of the passenger airbag. Because my dad has a 2009 Silverado that had its airbag replaced, and the dash is cracked right at the top left corner of the airbag; thankfully it hasn’t progressed any further, but I have seen vehicles that are just as bad as the early 2000s dodge rams where large chunks of the dash are missing.
@@digitalrailroader I'd say it comes down to "it not being a major safety concern" for the cracked dashes (you know companies and wanting to save their pennies on a technicality). I'd say probably 90-95% of those trucks have cracked dashes and I know that when we do those airbag recalls the service advisors must log whether or not the dashboards are cracked beforehand. My family has a 97 Dodge and the entire top of the dash had disintegrated, just blowing on it would make pieces fall off. Luckily though I did manage to find a reproduction top to fix it (it really needed the whole dash but so far there doesn't seem to be replacements of those out there).
Funny how the subjects of the videos changed but the root of the disaster is the usual "cutting costs". That never changes. You could even say that it`s a classic.
But nobody made them switch to the more expensive propellant in the first place? They created the problem, then instead of just going back to the previous way, implemented an absolute disaster of a "fix."
@@Notmyname1593 Good point, tho at least if they'd waited until then they might have had a chance at some sympathy and/or even more favorable treatment by the NHTSA.
I was in a freeway accident in a civic from a few years after the ones in question. 10/10. I ran away from the accident. Just out of danger, not from the cops. I was physically able to run seconds after my civic was hit by an extra large pick up that was towing a load. Car was totaled, the guy who hit me and the guy my car was pushed into both came away worse then me. Shout out to the Honda crumple zone engineers they save lives.
Same for my Wife, hit at 65 mph from a texting driver. Walked away with just the basic common whiplash and confusion. One year later to the week, she was hit again, and again her Honda was totaled but she and our dog and cat came out unscathed.
Same for me. I was at a complete stop on the freeway when a texting driver hit me (he claims he fell asleep). I saw him coming from a distance away in my mirror. I just put my hands at 10 and 2, shifted to neutral, rested my head against the headrest, foot on the brake and clutch, and waited. All happened in a few seconds, but plenty of time to prepare and wait for the inevitable. Rear end crushed in all the way to the front seats, but the doors could still open for me to get out. I miss that car. Lots of happy memories
Flipped my 90s civic from a nail in my tire. Weirdly, airbag didn’t deploy but I didn’t even get whiplash. Whole thing was crazy, car was totaled but yeah anything else probably wouldn’t have held up -also, I had coincidentally had my window down which was the only way I was later able to exit the car (the hood was crushed in) stability definitely 10/10
I used to make the airbags that were replacing the Takata airbags, in training they showed us a bunch of videos of people who had been injured by the bad ones. It was rough.
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How the f did you break your first car
That mf looks like it got hit by a semi truck
Really impressive how you can take jabs at capitalism when a company acts in a negligent manner to cut costs while ignoring that those actions were taken by a company that had already established their market share. Even more tone deaf is the condemnation of capitalism when capitalism is solely responsible for the decades of innovation that you had literally just discussed.
I still have my OG Takata airbags in both the vehicles I drive👍
How do we get ahold of a couple of those air bags. We can send them to all the air bag seat prank dummies that went viral… only this time it will be sweet revenge for the dummies that got blasted with the old style of air bags.
@@BrettShadow japanese car fanboy trying to justify his choice in vehicle.....after purchasing it with proceeds from working in a capitalist system.....and the vehicle only being available due to supply and demand of....you guessed it....a capitalist system.
I wonder how many North Koreans can buy a honda fit? 🤔
Honda Canada was so aggressive about the recall, they sent letter after letter and made phone call after phone call, they got pretty agitated that I was ignoring the recall. My reason was my 2001 Accord CG2 wasn't running so I couldn't bring it in. They came and changed the airbag in my driveway while I was at work.
honda is normally very big on driver/passenger safety. its one of their primary selling points. they do their job well.
Man that's dedication, my work van (Dodge) had an active recall for a cooling fan for the engine, but the kicker was there wasn't a fix available at the time from any of the dealers in our area, and we ended up retiring it out of service before hearing any more about the recall, the service centres in our area apparently never received the replacement parts that we needed
@@GearGuardianGaming They're only this big on safety because that specific model and year is designated an "alpha" car, meaning the airbag is way more likely to send shrapnel into your face. Any other inflator and they'll just spam you with letters till you show up. They had me running to junkyards to replace inflators of several alpha cars (and only alpha cars) one time.
That was the case with Nissan here in Australia. I must have received a dozen letters from them over the years about my 2005 Pulsar, long after I'd sold it for scrap!
@@GearGuardianGaming if only they were dedicated enough to actually get good airbags
Silly me, I actually PAID EXTRA for a vintage Chevy that has a solid steering column that will impale me and a solid hood known to cut the driver in half during front end collisions. And two giant saddle tanks on either side that blow up on impact! The original owner didn't get the seatbelt option...
Back in the day GM knew how to prevent lawsuits and recalls - don't let them survive!
Now that's some big brain moves right there.
This. 🤣😂
My first car was a 1975 AMC Gremlin and I loved the little death trap. No power steering, no power brakes, only a single lap belt up front and nothing for the back seat.
Recently I suggested to my dad that we should get it road worthy again, and he balked at the idea, saying that it wasn't safe! It's almost like he loves his grandkids more than he loves his own kids, knowing who's gonna be driving it soon!
Top tier comment
@@mrblack5145 LOL, my dad was the one who suggested the truck I bought. I don't think "how safe is this vehicle" is a question I've ever asked myself. It still ain't a motorcycle...their "air bag" is gravel.
@@ryanroberts1104 idk these car descriptions are making gravel sound good
As an engineer, I guarantee you that the company treated the engineers like garbage when they raised their concerns, then blamed them once they forced them and everything didn't go according to plan. Business people seem to really think you can just ignore things like physics, because with enough engineering you can defy all reality. Sadly, this is why you should never comply when forced to do something like this and leave the company once you've realized that's the type of company they are.
Yeah, ideally you'd also blow the whistle. The certain retaliation that would result should earn some CEO a long stint in prison, as a teaching aid.
Execs and admins tend to make insane demands and figure “some smart guy” down the line will figure out how to do it. They then promote the middle managers who promise it can be done, realistically or not. Engineers and technical workers are the ones who end up breaking their backs trying to make it work and then get the blame when it becomes clear that it can’t.
@@johnl5350 Yeah, right, prompt jail time for the guilty party. I see it all the time (sarc).
Totally different industry (I'm a truck driver) but this applies pretty broadly. Driving when too tired is a big problem in trucking. One piece of advice I give to newbie truck drivers is that if their dispatcher is ever pressuring them to drive when they believe they are too tired to drive safely, it's time to find a new company. Some other company will be happy to hire you BECAUSE you refused to drive when you knew it wasn't safe. Delivering late is bad, but it's better than a crashed truck.
Business people are funny. They don't have to know anything about what you said. Science? Whatever. Just let it break what could go wrong. There's no incentive for them to do the right thing. And then yea they blame the engineers for their mistakes. Seen it happen personally and also, look at Boeing.
A few years ago my mom got a recall notice for the airbags in her Camry. She assumed it was related to the Takata incident and immediately made an appointment to have it serviced. Turns out a Toyota storage facility had a spider problem and there were colonies of spiders living in the airbags waiting to be installed. The airbags were deploying inside of cars after installation because spiders were tripping the sensors.
Imagine a spider(s) flying into your face when your airbag deploys... eww
Im not sure how that'd work. There are crash sensors and multiple others that trigger air bags but I ain't saying anything isnt possible
Is the inner airbag just that much more sensitive because there isnt a large chunk of metal dampening it?
@@CodyDoesIt an electrical short is a positive sensor activation, even if it's not a proper activation.
ok, thats... nightmare fuel
I work as a postman. The amount of bloody registered letters requiring ID that was sent out over this clusterfeck was astounding.
And so many of them would say something along the lines of either 'dammit, i thought it was fixed already' or occasionally 'I sold that bloody thing years ago'
This seems like a pretty unusual perspective. I've never received something like this through registered mail, but it makes sense.
@@johnl5350 your experience is not universal buddy
I still get notices on a mercury’s front end corrosion recall when I sold the car like 8 years ago now… the thing is, I had an avenger with two major recalls that I never got a letter about, the mechanic just mentioned it in passing during an oil change lol. Wasnt even a dodge mechanic.
My dyslexic arse saw “po” and “st” in the same word and was wondering what unique insight a pornstar had on this situation…
@@Jenna_Miles ...
I used to be an engineer for a major airbag company, and I'm married to someone who used to work at Honda. I can tell you since 2008 engineers were quitting Takata in Michigan because of their extremely low standards of quality. They would test the same crappy design 10 times, it would fail 9 times but submit the 1 pass as the final result. What you need to understand is in Japan they have 'Keiretsu' where two companies will basically always give each other business. Takata is 'Keiretsu' with Honda. Regardless of their product, Honda would continue to buy it. Takata cared less and less about quality, so much that it was normalized to just make fake test reports for tests that were never performed. Again, Honda would buy them anyway. Finally, my wife told me that she witnessed an inflator go off in a technicians face when he was replacing the faulty airbag. they were basically extremely volatile bombs that got worse over time. there was blood everywhere. They paid off the injured employee to stay silent.
It's really paradoxical, this entire affair; usually Japanese cars (and, by inference, their components) are such high quality.
I'm happy that Takata, in the end, got shafted out of business. Good riddance.
Sounds like Japan in a nutshell. Ignoring every problem in front of them to preserve the status quo.
@@testname4464 That's literally every company in America too, lol.
@@Mercurio2435 that's why you see class action lawyers soliciting their promises of a easy payday against companies who usually settle and consider whatever the amount just another business expense. but sometimes businesses fold from legal action unfairly look up the case of the gas can maker vs idiots catching fire by abusing the product sad story it's on UA-cam
@@mnxs Where a car comes from doesnt mean anything. Especially not nowadays. I hear that so often: Japanese cars are so reliable. Italian and British cars are not. Thats utter bullshit. They are all the same. All the companies try to safe cost. You cant simply have a car that is cheaper then the competitor, but at the same time it is of higher quality somehow. The only way this would be possible are lower wages in the manufacturer country. Japan is not a low income country (anymore). Thats why the South Koreans take their market positions (Kia and Hyundai).
Over the last decade, I have seen so many cars from Japan with serious problems, like broken transmissions. Not only in the cheap cars, but also in the flagship vehicles.
They are not alone: German cars, American cars, British cars, doesnt matter at all. There are no perfect vehicles. They always have something, at least minor defects or quality issues.
Im a technician at a JDM manufacturer. Still to this day we get cars in our shop that need the recall done. We get one in every couple days. Its downright scary how many vehicles this issue affected.
Very terrifying
I bought a 2003 Toyota Corolla last year (250k+ km on the clock), the airbags have been replaced right after I bought it, the previous owner never complied with the recall order, basically he stated that he did not had the time for it. He then sold it to my garage/dealer who said, hey we have a nice used car (indeed it is a nice car, it's my third Corolla) for you, only one thing there is a recall for the airbags so we already made an appointment with a Toyota garage for it, that was around the corner for me and they took about two hours to complete the job. No time for it? Yeah sure, knowing now that previous owner surely did run the gauntlet with those faulty airbags.
I worked at an Australian car dealership, and they used to have a bloke whos full time job was replacing those airbags.
My husband still hasn't had his done. He got the letters when he first had his STI, sold it, then ended up buying it back and he still gets postcards now and then. Meanwhile, I've driven a string of Fiats that were oddly unaffected 😅
Replaced the airbag in my 2010 Honda Accord a few days after they issued the recall. 3 weeks later I was in an accident where the airbag deployed.
Car was totaled and I ended up buying a 2009 Mazda6. I then had to replace the airbag in that one too...
I just want to recommend “There Are No Accidents” by Jessie Singer. Brilliant book that investigates the negligence that allows tragedies like these to continue. The managers purposefully ignoring the engineers reminds me of the culture at Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas.
Yeah. And a Boeing official, higher up in the hierarchy, described the culture as: 'run by clowns, supervised by monkeys'
@@Kyle-gb9dqSounds about right for Corporate America
That's actually 2 pretty good examples, good on you my man! I've read both the book and about some of McDonell Douglas gross negligences a few years back, mainly the cargo door bursting open mid flight on the DC-10. Remember, gentlemen's agreement is synonymous to corruption.
Exactly. 737 disasters. Fuck those guys.
this comment aged pretty well lol
This ,the Kobe Steel quality scandal and a few other Japanese industrial scandals all seemed to come out around the same time and could be some content on this channel someday too. They all basically had their roots in the lost decade, japanese corporate culture, and the loss of a quality focused company culture as well as a healthy amount of corruption and coverups
I’ll have to look into those thanks!
Kobe scandal?
They're usually held up as a paragon a quality within the steel industry (in which I work). What precisely was the scandal about?
There's a reason Japanese companies now employ a "loud American" (not always Americans, but that's the stereotype) specifically to counter the cultural tendency to agree with their superiors.
I'd also add the Toyota "sudden acceleration" brake issue, which killed dozens of people in the early 2000s.
@@PlainlyDifficult Don’t forget the scandal of the united states shipping the 9/11 steel off for recycling before properly analyzing it, and the whitewash report from NIST which ignored first responder reports of secondary explosions, and their persistent refusal to release the data behind their collapse model. They claim to do so would “jeopardize safety” yet they have not issued a single new directive regarding changes that should be made in current or new construction on the basis of their purported discovery of “a new type of fire-induced progressive collapse.”
For more information I recommend the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization.
Lexus notified me of my faulty Takata airbag on the passenger side. I was advised not to use the front passenger seat at all until a replacement was installed. Problem is, that took like 8 months because they couldn't manufacture new airbags fast enough to fix all the recalls.
In my case, it wasn't a huge inconvenience. But Lexus said that if I needed full use of the front seat, they would pay for a rental car for those 8 months. Can you image how much money that would cost multiplied over tens of thousands of car owners?
Luckily, Lexus probably has rental cars available directly to them so it isn't as much of a hit as to an individual.
Still expensive though when you need thousands of cars on the road you can't sell as new.
I would’ve taken the free rental for 8 months and kept the mileage/wear and tear off my own car.
@@reinbeers5322
I happen to know that Lexus was contracting with Enterprise Rent-a-Car for the rentals. I work for Enterprise, and I know that any car they provided me would not have been as nice as my own. :D
@@annehaight9963 Ah, then fair enough. I assumed Lexus would be able to just use cars provided by them to save costs.
@@reinbeers5322
Putting wear and tear on new cars would significantly reduce their value since they would then be "used cars", and I don't know if they would have had that many new cars to provide. Rental fleets are already set up to shift cars from one location to another in large quantities on short notice.
My car was one of the ones recalled a couple of years ago. When the engineers opened it up to replace the bags, they discovered that following a previous accident, the disreputable mechanics had stuffed in the old air bags and cut the cable to them. It was still a potential death trap, but a different kind of deathtrap.
imagine if they have done that to your car, how many others have the same issue cause of the mechanic.
@@anaymakan6989 I now refuse to buy any car that has been in an accident, no matter how minor.
That’s a police matter, they have most likely killed at least one person by doing that to others.
@@tomsoki5738 I know, but it was so long ago that I've no hope of finding the cowboys, much less bringing them to justice. It was in about 2010 that they did their work.
@@SonOfFurzehattWould you sell your car if you got into a minor fender bender?
The saddest airbag story I ever heard was from a friend of a friend. She had her two year old daughter with her while she was out shopping. She wanted to keep the child safe while she loaded the groceries into the trunk, so she put her in the front seat, knowing she would put her in her car seat in the back after she was done with the groceries. As she is working at the back of the car, someone pulled into the parking space in front of hers and barely tapped her vehicle with their car. However, it was enough to activate the airbag, which went off and hit the little girl in the face, instantly breaking her neck and killing her. It's just something you never think about.
yikes
That's really sad. I guess that's why more modern vehicles activate airbags only above certain vehicle speed
That’s the domino effect on roids
@Johnny.The.Jacko and with certain amount of weight on the passenger seat
Omg that's horrible 😢
Thank you, you've saved my life. When you said Acura, my blood froze and my stomach turned. I searched my VIN on the NHTSA site, and yep, it's recalled.
I've driven this thing almost 5 years, and my sister drove it for 6 years before that, all without knowing we were in a death trap. Thank goodness we never got in a crash. I'm still upset that the NADI inflator in my car was added to the recall nearly 3 years ago and neither of us got notified!
Early Jeep Libertys are worse, because the air bag can randomly inflate, even with no crash! And I don't know what Diamler Chrysler used for the air bag maufacturer.
Relax. You’re roughly driving one ton of metal and a few gallons of flammable fuel. All vehicles have been part death traps since of nineteen always.
@@Bonanzaking absolutely true, eff cars, I'd rather travel by train if it was available. Recalls are just really spooky to me and I did not expect to be affected, lol
@@Connie.T. ah train, must be a commie and a member of the cult of safety.
wow
You should put a 'Profitability' section at the end of each scandal episode. Like, how much did the company make out at the end of the day after paying off fines, lawyers, settlements, etc. Since shockingly often when corporations do shit like this, even if they get caught they wind up ahead after all the profit made before getting caught.
This is an incredibly good idea
I hope he sees this comment but it’s months old now, so he probably won’t. Keep commenting this until it happens!
Punishable by fine really just means legal for a price.
People say you can't put a price on a human life, but businesses, government, insurance companies, and courts do it every day.
Two thumbs up for the Profitability section.
True
I have to admit that when I got the recall notice for my Accord, I didn’t take it that seriously. My wife, thank goodness, did. She had both airbags done promptly. Until this video, I didn’t realize how much danger there was. Thank you so much for doing this! Excellent content as usual.
My sister didn't take it seriously for 8 months until I found out she had a vehicle on the list. I yelled, she took her car in for a replacement lol
Go say thank you to your wife too
Yeah, it took me at least a year to get the ignition fixed in my caddy after getting tons and tons of leaflets periodically. I guess the issue was, a heavy Keychain or other torque could just, kill the engine while driving.
And yet another reason women live longer than men.
😂
I assumed the airbags had failed to protect some people. In reality the airbags actively killed some people.
I worked at a Mitsubishi dealership several years ago. One of only 2 in my city. We got a massive list of customers who had vehicles with Takata airbags. I was shocked at the amount of people who declined to have this recall done because they thought it was a marketing ploy to bring their car in and be upsold on services. Even after being told that it's free, and that it's a major safety recall, and that the dealership wouldn't look at anything else if they don't want it, and that it was absolutely FREE and their car would also get washed for free, some people outright refused. I thought they were crazy to do this. Hope they're ok and that these air bags didn't blow up on them.
That's not true because they will literally break laws break into your garage and replace the airbag
@@everythingponyme when I make up lies and spread misinformation online
@@everythingponymaybe some dealerships did this. But every company in the world wouldn't handle it in the same way
My husband’s mother had a car with this type of airbag (they had the recall notice). They got in an accident while she was teaching him to drive (he panicked and floored the car into a tree, SpongeBob style), but the airbags in the car didn’t go off at all. Terrifying to think that the airbags for that specific car being faulty in a completely different way probably saved their lives.
The SpongeBob style part made me lol.
FLOOR IT!
BACKIINGGG UUUUPPPPPPPPPPP!
*deep voice* "OH, SPONGEBOB.....WWWWHHHHYYYYY???"
Please 😂😂😂 the description of him smashing the pedal is so funny. I can visualize it 😂
I attended a crash recently (as an emergency services volunteer) where a young man had his legs on the dash of the car he was the passenger in. No seatbelt was worn either.
The car had come to a sudden stop from around 80-100km/h, front on, into a rather large tree. The force of the impact and the airbag going off combined to eject him completely over the top of his seat's backrest and into the back bench seat of the car.
Needless to say, the human body was not designed the endure such sudden direction change forces, and he suffered the agony of pretty much everything below and including his pelvis being... not as straight as it was before the incident. Many things were broken.
I do hope he's recovered, but it would be a long road back to normal after that. Airbags are a great thing when used as designed, but for god's sake keep your feet off the dash!
I recall a video a while ago where someone suddenly stopped their car and the passenger had their legs up on the dash and no seatbelt on slid down into the legroom space butt first. I think they were panicked and uncomfortable, but with little to no flexibility that could be some serious pain - it may have though and the panic and adrenaline maybe masked it.
@@Sunari that sounds comedic, and awkward to get out even with help
@@David-gk2ml It didn't show her getting back up into the seat so I imagine they had to pull over or park somewhere so they could get her door open and hopefully (and awkwardly) slide out of the car. Otherwise that would've taken some good arm muscle maybe, but yeah really awkward position to escape from the looks of it.
Placing one's feet on my dashboard will result in injury...no crash required.
I've heard of legs up on the dash, airbag goes off, sending knee caps into eye sockets. I feel like telling people this when I see them with legs up on dash.
This recall saved my life. I remember getting the letter when this all came out. Got my 2005 Honda's airbags replaced. It's a good thing I did, because 9 months ago, I was in a bad accident and the airbags went off. 😐
Luckily I'm just fine, so was my unborn daughter. I'm sure the airbags saved me from further injury, or death.
You are very lucky, my 2004 Nissan Sentra just last year(2021) was in an accident; Even replacing the airbags within the later recall(After Honda was expanded upon) resulted in a deployment of airbags exploding beyond what they should, I'm glad your car was fixed properly!
Good grief, that would be absolutely terrifying getting into an accident like that, and chilling knowing it could have been even worse. Glad to hear you and your baby are okay, I hope everything goes smoothly with the pregnancy.
Had these airbags on 2011 Silverado not only was the airbags recalled but so were the airbag sensors on my truck. Not only was it a claymore but it was an overly sensitive claymore!
I don't trust my airbags at all. They're disabled until I find a dummy plug for the crash sensor, then my car will probably be a few pounds lighter. I plan on using something that is soft enough to prevent brain damage & letting momentum run its course instead of making something to counteract momentum, which will theoretically make damage to the body's internals less likely & less severe. I prefer using foam padding, but it has to be thick enough to better disperse energy & slow down momentum. My goal would be for the impact to be good for freeway speed impacts.
@@KrazyKeith4 In case you are serious and not joking: You obviously aren't going to be able to have a large enough foam pad infront of you to work better than an airbag and still see something out of the car while driving. I think you don't understand the forces involved when your 5kg head is travelling even just 60km/h and the car suddenly stops. It is something in the magnitude of dropping a bowling ball from 15m, do you think some piece of foam will do anything to protect from those forces?
After the wreck, the police officer told me that I was lucky the airbags hadn't come out, because I'd be dead or badly injured. Looking forward to the new Scandal series. Thank you, Plainly!
This one was huge, advertising on the TV even to remind people to check if they were effected here in Australia. Someone else might be able to corroborate this but I'm sure they were even playing the advert to check if your car was effected while you waited for the film to start in the cinema? Vague memory of it but might be mistaken...
Now you've done this you'll be hounded to do the emissions cheating scandal
I second that hounding
Yes, I remember this because they wanted them all replaced by a certain date? I bought my car new and it had these airbags. The dealership sent me letters and then ended up calling me to get it done because I was lazy and left it untill the last minute ☹
@@LilDitBit "what if you crash"
"I'm a good driver, I'll be fine" ...
Not that I can mock my car doesn't have an airbag let alone a faulty one🤣
Tell me about it!! I used to think those VW diesels were a true feat of modern engineering. Turns out, it's just easier to lie and cheat than it is to make a clean diesel. *Sigh*
I can say you are correct it did appear in some preroll for the cinema, was on some free to air ads. And on normally a printed out piece or paper/poster in mechanic workshops.
Source, I was a mechanic around that time and that whole thing was a nightmare to deal with.
I was working for a Ford/Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership when this recall was going on. We had calls DAILY from people furious at how, not only was there shrapnel in their airbags, but the parts required to perform the recall were on back order for MONTHS!! What a mess! Plus, depending on what car you had, it could take anywhere from an hour to a day and a half to perform the repair. So naturally, some car owners were waiting FAR longer than others to get this fixed, and were very bothered by this. I didn’t blame them - I couldn’t get my Takata recall done for over a year! What a time!
What when? It's still going on. I bought old 2008 Ford Mondeo and after few years of ownership, just few months ago I got letter from Ford that you're car has Takata airbag and they urge to go to stealership for free change of unit.
@@jothain I guess I should say, the first couple of years that recall mailers were going out in the US. I haven’t worked in the auto industry since, so I hadn’t thought about it ever since I got my recall done. :)
It's amazing more people didn't get injured or killed
It took me almost 2 years to get the phone call to bring in my 2005 civic, then a month later they sent out the letter for the passenger side.
Good times hey
This issue affects me personally, since my grandpa worked at a takata manufacturing plant for many years which shut down after the recall. He always complained about the outsourcing and declining quality of takata products; corporate greed ruining things once again.
Can you really complain about outsourcing in relation to any of this? It was a deliberate and negligent design decision made at the highest levels of the company.
@@iusethisnameformygoogleacc1013 Unless they are Japanese, they were the outsourced work. You can in fact outsource work to the United States.
@@dragonkingf3 Absolutely. In fact, at that time... I serviced the machinery in a shop in California that made the nozzles for the airbag inflators Takata used in their products. The shop had GOOD standards and kept up high quality control as a matter of pride.. up until the moment they got a phone call and Takata canceled their contract immediately. I know for a fact that the parts leaving the shop were in spec and well made. They were not paid for the last shipment of parts either. Those little nozzles, about the size of a 25 cent piece and about 3/8" tall were shipped out weekly in 55 gallon drums, many drums at a time. 180 people were suddenly unemployed. They came to work.. and the doors were "locked". The owners of the company nearly bankrupted themselves making sure everyone of their employees was paid. The owners were very very nice and decent people and took a huge personal hit to take care of their employees. I was an outside vendor but they took care of me as well. They were making parts to spec and shipping them on time. Takata screwed them blind. Company name = Multiscrew Manufacturing IRRC. La Habra, California.
Thanks for the video. Id almost forgotten this.
@@iusethisnameformygoogleacc1013 yeah, I have limited chemistry knowledge, but when I heard Ammonium Nitrate.... like wtf??? Why didn't any of the engineers report this insanity?
@@corneliusthecrowtamer1937 My first thought was, isn't that what Timothy McVeigh used to blow up that building in Oklahoma City? That seems a little too explody to me. The engineers did know and kept their mouths shut. Where is a good whistler blower when you need one?
I saw the recall letter and called my nearest Honda dealership in London, UK, to arrange to replace it. They were amazingly laid back about it. Around 3 months later I finally booked it in and spent half a day getting it sorted. That was a year before it prooved to be a good idea to have sorted it The front passenger wheel wobbled then fell to a stop under the car. It happened to be the first time I had ever placed my toy sized pooch on the front seat next to me. The passenger airbag went off, making me jump out of the car in shock. I ran around the front to see what had happened. When I walked back to the front seat I looked over to see my pooch sitting and staring wide eyed at me with a shower of white dust snowing down on him. Poor love! Thank goodness I followed up on the recall.
23:56 Ah, now we see the problem. The Takata employees were probably using the strangely anatomically correct "crash test" dummies for something other than their intended purpose.
Was waiting for this comment lol
Must be cold inside that building lol
and it even got the tiny bulge in the "melon"
On a side note, nothing lasts longer than a car serviced by it's owner.
Well done John, we are a dying breed.
Thank you! It gives me a chance to unwind
Always work on your own stuff if you can, then you at least KNOW exactly WHAT was done and the quality of the materials used.
Its always great when they put the spark plugs right where you can't get to them without disassembling half the front end. The point still stands however. Doing your own work on your own vehicle is super important.
@@sammorris2721 : Because of a tumor i had to give my beloved Grand Cherokee to a "mechanic" .... was running like a rubber ball when getting it back ...
5 WRONG (short) spark plugs !
NEVER AGAIN !
@@sammorris2721 Cars are designed to keep home mechanics from doing anything easily
Scandal Scale idea: 1-10, 1 being an accident, company taking responsibility and action before gov, etc. and 10 being completly illegal and endangering the lives of a significant amount, like state wide or country wide depending on where it takes place
That's a winner of an idea. Maybe with enough thumbs up this comment will be seen.
And each number is one little spoonful of brightly colored porridge thrown at the chalkboard. Or a tomato.
Or a scale 1-10 with four factors considered
Risk of injury/death
Companies knowledge of issue
Companies actions to mitigate injury/death
Companies actions to hide issue
IMO the archetypal 10 would be something like the Rosenberg spy ring that allowed the Soviets to get the bomb. Seismic event that shook up the world order to the core.
10 being willful and directed avoiding of dealing with the issue/ covering it up/ all in the name of both profit and worry about reputation
My buddy actually worked for Takata in product development and told them about the problem. He was sidelined and fired. They knew well in advance!
That’s insane!! 😮
This might sound silly, but I would be super interested in a series about stairwell collapses. Ever since going up some pretty sketchy stairs in Rome it's been something I've wondered about. Love the content!
Bruh I live in the US and some staircases I’ve encountered make me say a quick prayer lmao
I didn't know I wanted this video but now I do!
Bridge / walkoverpasses etc are relatively common collapses... AvE talks about things like that occasionally and high rise crane collapses.
I would be interested in seeing you fall down a staircase.. oh the irony!
Call it "One Step From Disaster".
Out of all the major recalls this is one of the most horrifying ones. Product safety is very important and shouldn't be taken lightly. The fact it's an airbag which is meant to keep you safe is even worse.
"Technically theres a bag that sometimes blows up in there"
I'd rather have my things recalled rather than them being left tbh
If I remember correctly, the only reason this was associated with hobda so heavily is that they were the first to be transparent about the problem.
Other manufacturers (including American ones) were also using them, and either weren't aware, ignored the problem, or were quietly phasing out the Takata brand air bags. So honda is not the devil here.
Honda isn’t as bad as Takata, but they certainly played a role in the amount of time it took for the issue to be identified. Settling out of court to avoid scrutiny from regulators was pretty shady.
My son was killed in a single auto accident involving a Ford Explorer, his airbag did not deploy, he was just 2 miles from home. Residents of Alaska could not b part of the class action lawsuit due to Alaska having one of the strictest torte reform laws around. Torte reform laws were ironically passed thru legislation & made law thru with heavy influence & support of Torte reform by my deceased son's paternal family; an aunt whom was a senator, her senator husband from another district and her Dr father. There's so much that hurts about this. Unintended consequences. Torte reform keeps any legal award under $50k so no lawyer in Alaska will do these kind of cases. This huge gaping hole left by my son's premature demise will never b filled nor will these mfs have accountability in the state of Alaska. It's been over 3 years since he died, alone, airbags failed to deploy and his body nor vehicle wasn't found until 'curfew' streets lights were turned back on hours later. He deserves better, so much better.
They most definitely are ONE of the devils here. Blinded by pure greed and self interest.
"But America!"
@@anitaevans5361 note to self: Never die in an accident in Alaska
Brilliant docu
Now I know why my 2011 Toyota rav 4 is being recalled. You have possibly saved my life. No bigger thank you can be Given.
Thank your for your support. Glad your car will be safe.
I did a paper on this in college. I found that the defective airbags mostly came from a manufacturing plant that was contracted out by TK Holdings, Inc. in South America. A faulty piece of equipment, coupled with the explosives, bad canister designs, and environmental factors; it led to this clusterfuck of a nightmare. Not to mention the damn company being corrupt as hell and no one really knowing what was going on
Did you get a good grade for that paper?
@@Leofwine either a low A or high B. Can’t remember
@@Joe_Cool48 they put their brand, so shouldn't they make sure it meet their standards?
@@bltzcstrnx You'd think. But as OP said. The company was corrupt. They probably contracted the factory for cheap and didn't care if people got hurt as long as they got as much money as possible. Funnily enough that tends to lead to problems with the product, which can get a company shut down if it's bad enough.
@@Joe_Cool48 If the teacher didn't give you at least an A for that I'm disappointed
I still remember the day during an English lesson I had with a student while living in Japan, around 2015.
It was our first lesson and he wanted to practice an English job interview.
Once done, I asked him who he worked for and why he wanted to practice interview. After some prodding, he finally revealed he just quit Takata that day and wanted to completely forget working for that company. Some of the things he told me were quite a surprise considering this was a Japanese company.
I read up on the company that night and yeah, I couldn't believe how this company managed to survive for so long.
Right? Usually the Japanese culture mitigates corporate greed with some integrity, not in this case apparently.
@@DaveSmith-v3twhat?
Its japan, their working mentality is the worst Ive ever seen. People working from over exhaustion and a skewered way of beliefs
Ashley, the second name on the list was such a said story. Hers was a slow speed collusion, her teacher had actually hit her (very VERY VERY SLOW SPEED. CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH). She was pulling out of the parking lot of her high school, and her teacher and her hit. It was such a terrible experience, for the family first and foremost, and for everyone around (school had just released.)
Ashley Parham, right? Hers is such a tragic tale, especially since her younger brother was in the car, so he watched the entire thing happen firsthand... Which is definitely going to give you some issues I'd imagine.
How does a school release?
@@DeltaAssaultGaming english might not be their first language, i would guess they mean it was the end of the school day and they were going home.
*I've been ignoring these letters for about 3 years. Think I'll call them back now, so THANK YOU*
I worked at a Chevy dealer in the early 2000's and was a specialist in electrical systems. Did the brief training in SRS, and replaced several airbags and seatbelt retractors under very limited number of recalls before the big Takata story. I think starting in 2003 there was recalls regarding airbags and seatbelt retractors either failing to deploy or releasing hot gas from airbag ripping mid deployment. Cant remember the brand, but I'd bet Takata.
An extra fun detail, normally you have to ship back the recalled parts to the manufacture with the paperwork from that vehicle (not cheap shipping because its a hazard). About 6 months into the recall, they longer wanted them back, so they refused to pay for shipping. Leaving the dealership holding the bag, because altho discharge is very unlikely without an electric spark, its reckless to toss them in the trash armed. The fun part was taking them outback and setting them off, uh I mean, rendering them safe to dispose of. After much scientific testing, you can rocket milk crates and road cones well over 20' into the air. Of course we used a very long wire set to set them off.
Every 6 months the dealership would have "customer days" inviting people to come by and look at new cars, the service area, new features and safety features. They only made me put on a show 1 once. They wanted me to show customers what happens in an accident. Well mostly old people showed up. First I talked about how the sensors worked and what the minimums were for deployment. Next I setoff the seatbelt retractor, helping to restrain a person in their seat. And finally setting off an airbag setup on a stand.
The crowd of 20 or so senior citizens gasped and yelled in shock. One gal turned ghost white and leaned onto her husband. They all started freaking out, asking if their cars had these horrible devices. I had done too good of a job it seems, not thinking that these people had no idea what an airbag really was or what it looks like not in some slow motion video without sound.
After spending the rest of the show trying to calm people down, my boss came out and let me know I wouldn't need to worry about doing another show ever again.
Great story, thanks for sharing. 😂
So where do you work now?
This story is a microcosm of why the US is such a laughing stock tragedy right now. You demonstrated how the safety features of how a car’s SRS system works and not only did the women recoil, their men also winced like sheltered children.
These kind of people would reject bandaids because removing them would temporarily hurt 🤦🏽♂️ the sound of an exploding airbag triggers them. At this point China can take over the US with a wheel barrel full of Takata airbags 🤦🏽♂️
You really need to combine that with a crash where you show a crash test dummy being thrown through the wind shield. The the air bag is the less scary option. Cars are inherently lethal (not just dangerous) and it would be nice if people had more respect for those dangers.
Great story. I crashed a Porche Carrera 4 into a heavy truck at 60mph. The airbags were true luxery and deployed so briefly. No injuries whatsoever. Not what I was expecting. Thankyou airbags.
As someone with an interest in energetic chemistry, it's kind of wild to realise that there's millions and millions of cars driving about the planet with little canisters of sodium azide or nitrotetrazole inside, or possibly the same compound that leveled a large portion of Beirut. The fact that Takata "improved" their occupant safety product with a propellant based on an industrial-grade blasting agent/fertiliser that was known to suffer from environmental degradation is totally crazy.
The Sodium Azide is the safe variant. The Takata airbags were filled with ammonium nitrate…
Sigh.
Two replies, and they're both restating points that were either explained in the video or mentioned in my comment. Not really the kind of interesting discussion I was hoping for, but oh well. 😆
This world is rapidly passing away and I hope that you repent and take time to change before all out disaster occurs! Belief in messiah alone is not enough to grant you salvation - Matthew 7:21-23, John 3:3, John 3:36 (ESV is the best translation for John 3:36) if you believed in Messiah you would be following His commands as best as you could. If you are not a follower of Messiah I would highly recommend becoming one. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life - Revelation 3:20.
Contemplate how the Roman Empire fulfilled the role of the beast from the sea in Revelation 13. Revelation 17 confirms that it is in fact Rome. From this we can conclude that A) Jesus is the Son of God and can predict the future or make it happen, B) The world leaders/nations/governments etc have been conspiring together for the last 3000+ years going back to Babylon and before, C) History as we know it is fake. You don't really need to speculate once you start a relationship with God.
Can't get a response from God? Fasting can help increase your perception and prayer can help initiate events. God will ignore you if your prayer does not align with His purpose (James 4:3) or if you are approaching Him when "unclean" (Isaiah 1:15, Isaiah 59:2, Micah 3:4). Stop eating food sacrificed to idols (McDonald's, Wendy's etc) stop glorifying yourself on social media or making other images of yourself (Second Commandment), stop gossiping about other people, stop watching obscene content etc. Have a blessed day!
Wumun asked Congress to mandate airbags.
Before you know it, we'll be riding in Uterus shaped cars filled with amniotic fluid.
@@FreightmareFTW You can get help being in a cult you know?
I work in the motor trade, for a company that sells several of the brands affected. This recall has been a pain in my arse for years.
Damn ... hope you will stay strong bro ! lol
Greet"s from Germany.
I appreciate the deliberate ad cut. Really makes it feel like I'm not going to miss anything, or lose a train of thought.
Thank you
Crash dummy at 23:55 looks a bit, uhm, excited. Or else it's very cold in the car.
This recall is the reason airbags have always, and still do, make me feel uneasy. I know they generally increase your chances of survival but they've always been one of those slightly terrifying things you just have to accept as part of modern life.
Also, you can't ignore the fact that more safety features often results in more risks being taken.
Eh just remove them and compensate with a roll cage, fire extinguisher and racing harness.
They are highly effective, the "bang" is small compared to the noise of impact.
These types will always feel invisible, even if a fork was mounted on the wheel pointed at their chests. Football players tended to do this too with improved helmets, using it as a weapon and impact point. Then it turned out this behavior was very harmful to everyone involved.
I was in a pretty severe accident about 10 years ago and the airbag injuries were insane. My eyebrows were burnt off of my forehead at the middle, my nose was broken and I had deep abrasions to my cheek and upper lip. Even my two front teeth hurt. On the way to the hospital, the emt told me that the airbag had fucked me up but that if I had hit a regular steering wheel, I'd have probably died from head trauma. (I am very short so the steering would have hit me hard in the mid face) My left eyebrow has never been the same ever since lol but I am glad to be alive.
When my car was recalled for the airbag, Honda said it would take months to get the parts. They were nice enough to have the car towed to the dealership and set me up with an enterprise rental car for 5 months. It was a really nice rental car too. I can only imagine how much that cost them.
at least they weren't scumbags about it
You got a rental?! I waited SIX MONTHS for parts for my Civic, and they let me drive it the whole time...
And here I was just annoyed that my mom only had to wait a week for her Accord to get fixed...
I had 3 different rental vehicles over a 10 month span while I was waiting on parts! Super lucky.
Months, wow, glad I didn't take mine in. Fuse is easy enough to pull. Maybe the dealer will find the part they need and let me bring it in once it arrives.
@@gblargg I brought in my 2002 Civic two years ago and they did it same day.
This video caught my attention because I've worked in the salvage industry for 10 years now and fairly frequently we have companies come out to replace Takata airbags. Doesn't matter if they are deployed or not. It's going to be an ongoing thing for a very long time I think.
Yes because there are alot of early 2000s vehicles still on. The road and especially reliable Honda's Takata airbags could still be a problem in 20 years in used cars
I ignored these letters for like 3 years but they kept sending them to me. Then one day I researched what happens and when I saw hospital photos of what happens when the airbags fail I immediately called the dealer ang got my airbags replaced. Damn those photos were scary. One poor guy had his eye gouged out from the metal shooting out.
claymores for airbags baby
Not blaming you or anything but why would you ignore a letter telling you there's a bomb in your car?
yes I just read the descriptions of the injuries.. I didn't even look at the pictures.. seems most of the deaths were just bled to death in minutes... horrifying
When they fail it is literally a grenade in your steering wheel. We talk about car parts grenading themselves, but this is the first time I've ever seen that term used accurately.
@@l.2620 to be fair, the letter doesn’t say “there’s a bomb in your car”. I also ignored the letter for a while when I had a Honda Civic because they didn’t really state how serious it was. I only got my airbag replaced when I went in for another issue and they did it without me requesting it.
I used to work at a Honda dealership in the U.S. and we had to replace takata airbags on cars from 2001 and up all for free. It still surprised me when I saw cars that had 200k on them roll in for the recall. The technicians that did them would blow up the old Takata air bags for fun every once and a while. Sounded like a gunshot lol
We only blow up the non recall ones. Getting one to launch in the air is the best part. Obviously in an open area and triggered from a distance for basic safety reasons.
Yup, fun thing to do waiting for jobs to come in, either pop air bags or fill bin liners with oxy-acetylene and touch them off. Back then i wondered why some of those JDM bags went off so much more violently than others.
Lmao love it
Had one go off (no shrapnel) in a front end collision back in 08 and it was like a grenade went off in the car. Absolutely unreal. Burned the skin off my arms where I was holding the wheel and some of my passengers nose. Also blew the bottom half of the front windshield glass out. Could barely hear anything for days.
It's crazy that you posted this recently, as my girlfriend just received a notice in the mail saying that her 2006 bmw has the same slight issue of having an improvised shrapnel bomb as an airbag. What's worse though is that the manufacturer or dealer took this long to finally let her know, surely they've know and just took their sweet time.
So it's full of deisel and has an explosive charge that shoots shrapnel thats a VBIED
Did she buy the car used or move since then buying it new? It may have taken some time to track her down.
it's a German company, they were probably trying to send a fax for 16 years.
"this is what we get for moving the factories to ireland"
I have one for my 2007 mondeo that I've had "on hold" for a while. I read some comments and they say some were replaced with other Takata airbags, its just the lifespan that gets them recalled. Either way, I'm making the call monday.
Working as a Toyota Mechanic and we're still seeing these airbags getting replaced once in a while. It's mostly people who ignored the recall notices but showed up years later for some other reason. I was pretty impressed with the actual rollout of the recall though. Back when we started receiving the replacements we did dozens a day, which was impressive as only specially trained mechanics were allowed to do the work. Seemed like it was about only a month or two before we had everyone upgraded to the new ones. Went really smooth.
How's mechanic work? Not an insult, genuinely curious on how does one get to the point of working as a certified mechanic.
Yeah I've got about 10 recall letters. I watched this documentary at random and I better get it looked at 🤣🤣
This recall potentially saved my life, or at least prevented injury. My dad had a 2008 Subaru Outback that was listed as a car that may have the affected airbags, so we got them replaced at a dealership. Fast forward 6 years and I was in a front corner collision that set off the steering airbag. I actually was unharmed, and never touched the airbag due to the angle of the crash, but it would have sent shrapnel into my face if it was one of the defective ones. Edit: it was probably closer to 2015 rather than 2011
It might have if it may have been faulty . A true what iffery if ever there were one .
Yeah, especially giving the long period of time after the compound could have definitely had at least some adverse effect given all that time to collect moisture with no agent inside to stop the change within the compound
@@MartianV2GG I live in a very humid area that can go from 25-50°F in less than a week during the autumn and spring months, so corrosion is a real problem with anything metal.
That “Y” on the envelope lmao.
Lol same thought
I had a 8th gen Honda Civic and around 2016 it was recalled for a Takata airbag. The recall was didn’t say “Your car is fucked, luv Honda” but I wish it did 😂
@Dew Vulpeus Wiggle room in the interpretation.
I always struggle with this.
Yes the fine destroyed the company, but the people responsible probably just joined other car manufacturers.
I honestly think that the CEO's and board should have to go to prison for murder. Never to come out. They knew it was dangerous and installed it anyway to make money. Rich people need to be held to account even more then poor people if only to show faith in the justice system.
Punishing people based on being ticher or poorer (aka their status) instead of their actual crime is how you lose further trust in the justice system as that is a perversion of justice.
@@D-Havoc Failing to punish those who had both the greatest authority and the greatest financial incentive is justice?
@@D-Havoc ok, so is a poor person stealing from a large grocery chain just as bad as that grocery chain embezzeling funds and putting people in danger for money? the more money you have, the more power and responsibility you have. the justice system should reflect that.
@@DaveSmith-v3tThat’s because evidence was collected illegally. That’s literally the system working as intended.
If you want to bring up an example of someone getting off on an actual technicality, talk about the guy who proved he was innocent of the crime that got him locked up for decades with new DNA evidence. He used up all his appeals by the time he proved it so the SCOTUS ruled he must stay in prison. This is more of someone getting ON, on a technicality, though.
@@hotpocketsat2am🎉🎉🎉 well said, I have an uncle who worked in finance for 40 years and he believes businesses are unfairly treated by our judicial system. Companies usually aren’t punished enough.
Yeah, as soon as I heard the names of literally every chemical used for airbags I immediately appreciated the problem. They're all explosives, but as you go down the list it changes from "something close to something you might blow a hole in a can with in a home lab" to "the cheapest and most common explosive on the planet"
@hakimmohamad6216 It is a fertilizer that absorbs humidity
ammonium nitrate is how you make pipe bombs
Worst explosive for pipe bomb
I had a Honda Civic 2006 in Brazil and they did a recall for both airbags as well. I had no idea it was such a big scandal, thanks for the great video as always.
Thank you
@@PlainlyDifficult isn't it worse in hotter country 's
The airbags on my Toyota Corolla had been “fixed” 6 times in the 3 years I had the car. 4 times for the passenger side, 2 times for the driver’s steering wheel. The fact that they couldn’t even get the recall replacements done correctly baffles me even further, and understandably exacerbates the cost on Takata.
The airbags in my Accord were replaced under recall twice, with the apparent explanation being that the original faulty airbags degraded over time, so the first replacement was to replace "old" airbags with new ones that still had a flawed design but being new, were not yet degraded, before later replacing the replacement with an airbag that didn't have the flawed design.
@@pulaski1 exactly the same reasoning for my multiple trips to the dealer
Had a friend back in 2009 with a 2007 corolla that was involved in her getting rear-ended at a red-light and the bags went off without much of a hitch, the rear of the car was only slightly dented but the dealership that she bought it from refused to give her service or replace the airbags until she threated to sue.
After that they had given her faulty takata airbags from I'm guessing another car, three weeks later she's at a red-light and gets rear-ended again by some kid only for the airbag to send fragments of metal clear across her temple and slice up her left ear, she tried to sue the brat's parents, toyota, and takata for the medical expenses but got told to pound sand on all three cases.
When the recall in 2013 happened, she got told to pound sand yet again when trying to get compensation from toyota since they told her that she was living on the edge of a "zone B area" and had expected the airbags to last between 10-15 years before degrading, and that they weren't going to do anything about it.
Needless to say, she's blacklisted both her kids from ever getting into a toyota after what happened to her and I think her dad winded up getting a few of his co-workers to sell theirs after the 2013 recall.
@@zeldazackman Insurers typically total (write off) any car where the airbags have deployed, so there is something very off about your friend's story, and that would explain why the dealer didn't want to replace the deployed airbags ... that just isn't usual after a car has been in any accident where the airbags have deployed.
I got a 94 camry
I used to work at a trucking company that transported these recalled airbags. You would not believe how many pallets of these I saw. We would sometimes just throw them in the trailer because the pallets would fall apart from having hundreds of them on each other and just straight up collapsing. Started working there mid 2017 in the height of everything
Hey John! Having owned a 2014 Toyota Corolla, living in Miami, and learning that the Takata airbag possibly affected my vehicle, I was ready to rush to Toyota to have my airbags switched. But thankfully my year/model of car wasn't included in the recall.
P.S. - In looking at the list of fatalities, there was someone who died in June 2016 who lived in Hialeah, FL, which is about 20 minutes from where I live. Yikes.
Omg, my mom plans to give me that exact model/year car and I've been thinking about this. Did the June 16 fatality have the same car?
@@deszalt4492 No...the person who died drove a Honda.
sell it before its too late
yep my mom has the same type of car and we live in central FL. Her model was older though nd was affected i think so she sent it in. it worked out though because they kept it for like a year and gave us a free rental car to drive that was way nicer lol. Whats kind of crazy is we actually did get into a horrible wreck with that rental car, and if that had been the corolla we could have died.
I still stock Takata warranty replacement airbags to this day. I see about 1-4 trucks a week that still need this recall performed.
My previous car, a 2002 Honda Accord, was part of that airbag recall. I took care of it promptly, because I don't fancy shrapnel to the face.
Some years later, I got another notice. I thought it was a mistake, but it turned out the replacement airbag was of the same type.
The second replacement lasted me until the car finally died in 2020, with no additional recalls, so that one must have been a different airbag assembly.
They informed me at a dealer that the replacements were stopgaps. The airbag assembly is safe but only for a period of a few years. I had it replaced twice. The 2nd fix was supposed to be the final fix.
@@Chironex_Fleckeri Honda: "Remember when we removed that frag grenade from your steering column? Yea...about that...we replaced it with another frag grenade."
Me: "Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!" 😳 "Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!"
Had the same issue with my 2005 accord. Had to get the airbags replaced twice. My accord is still kicking! Wonderful cars though!
Well that’s heckin’ scary
@@davidg5898 Kaboom
This recall affected our family 2008 Ford Galaxy. Only took them 14 years to recall the goddamn thing! Thank god the Takata airbags never went off.
I was building airbags when this happened, you will be happy to know that other companies took this extremely seriously and went threw every step to prevent this or other safety issues.
Heyyyy same
Same, I worked in KSS.
I actually had a vehicle that had one of these airbags in it. It was on my Nissan Sentra.
I was contacted for several months about having them replaced by the dealer.
I finally got a chance to get up to the dealer, and just a WEEK later, I got into an accident on a rural road at night where I hit three cows that were scattered across a road.
My airbags deployed. Had I not had them replaced, I could've been seriously hurt. It was scary how close the events took place.
Good video, Plainly Difficult.
This is wild and I literally knew nothing about it, I got a recall notice in the mail shortly after getting my 2007 Mazda6 around 2016. Took it to the dealership and had it fixed(?) no problem. I spun off the road a few years later and crashed in a field and the airbags didn’t even deploy. I guess I prefer that to dying in a car bomb explosion 😂
17th may, 2017 I was tboned by a very very very drunk driver… my airbags didn’t deploy either.
Not a good thing it didn't deploy, but anyways.... Maybe you won't be here if it did. Geez this story is serious
The front airbags will only deploy in a frontal collision with forces made in a 30+mph impact (roughly) Such as rear ending the car in front or head on collision.
For the t bone crash if side airbags were fitted they should have deployed.
I worked for Honda NZ while I was still in highschool and sorting through thousands of these airbags to send back to Japan. Can still remember alot of the serial numbers for each type of airbag recalled. Had no idea how widespread the problem was at the time. Great video 👍
Thought I’d double check after watching this. My vehicle was affected. I bought the car off dad, but he got it fixed.
Great video, mate.
Great video. I'm an auto tech at a Lincoln (Ford) dealer and here in 2022 I'm still replacing several Takata airbags a week. Pays the bills. Love to see this content on your channel which I usually follow for environmental disasters.
Also love to see a fellow ScanGuageII user! Great devices!
I was working in Honda's Swindon plant purchasing office when this kicked off. I knew the purchasing team managing Takata, and it was a regular topic in meetings. Everyone at Honda was taking it super seriously, there weren't even jokes about it like you would normally get if someone made a mistake. I think a lot of us were shocked and worried about how it could happen as everything safety wise was tested in full scale crash tests multiple times during the vehicle development, including climatic stuff. I remember the general comments around how difficult it was to understand exactly what was going on at Takata at the time. When all this first started Honda genuinely believed it was a small batch of manufacturing defects - we genuinely had no idea, and we used to audit the supplier plants reasonably regularly. You mention in the video how this sunk Takata, but at that point the OEM's were also seriously concerned it could sink them too. The recalls cost billions.
Ironically an airbag had never been proven to actually save anyone's life at the time, and it was considered if maybe even removing them completely would have been safer...
Here in Brazil Honda used to deactivate the affected airbags until they had the parts to do the recall. My friend's mother's Civic went to dealer an astonishing 4 times to do the recall!! Then he learned it was because wires were doomed to be cut because other nations were a priority.
That can't be right. I had air bags in my 1997 Accord. This is around my car that's a 2009. Dodge Challenger. More expensive cars would have had them first, like BMW or Saab.
I had a car accident not to long ago and my airbag didn't deploy I got out my car the same way I came in with my front all screwed up and the rest of the car perfectly fine. So it's better to not have a airbag deployed.
No1 was making jokes cuz this ain't the 1980s where you're working in a frat house . No more cracking beers on Fridays and calling in a stripper for Todd's 69th birthday.
If Sally in marketing overheard ( which lets be honest shes the company eavesdropper) then you know she'll tell on the lot, eventually making its way to the ear of none other than Mr. Honda himself.
@@BoleDaPole Deep breaths mate
Back in 2016, Honda Malaysia decided to issue letters to owners. I was one of the small-time employees on short contract to prep the letter. It took them 6 years to issue a recall in Malaysia. Even then, customers had to wait months
Oh dear gods. THIS. This is one of the recalls that bent over damn near every manufacturer out there. Im a former Chrysler tech in Canada, i did an absolute assload of recalls; though i was out just before this one really hit. Your description of the airbag system is on point; its also why people should never put *anything* on steering wheels or other components marked airbag, elsewise you turn them into Claymore mines. These airbags are also an example of when cars get more complicated, more faults appear. My 13 Jeep JKUR didnt get hit with that specific recall, but my family members did - with their permission/informed consent i disabled the airbag system altogether until the fault was repaired at the dealership. Perhaps not 'ideal' but ill take disabling a potential bomb over not, anyday.
Good idea for a series! Just the auto sector alone could keep you going for decades.
Your comment reminded me of "just rolled in" channel where someone had glued pretty much the entire interior full of those plastic decoration gems. Yes including steering wheel and car had come for airbag recall. I just wondered what the driver would look like after airbag would deploy on that car. Likely blind, swallow bunch of them and maybe even nostrils filled with those 😂
The amount of insanity people do to their cars 🙄
I cannot imagine working in distribution or sales and having to deal with something like this, the amount of headaches a major recall would give you lmao.
What do people put on steering wheels? What on earth would benefit being on the steering wheel??
@@Neppy22 decoration usually.
Didn’t realize that companies making safety equipment could backfire so horribly. Seems like air bags are old tech for them to such a mistake.
Don`t underestimate the businessmens desire for chopping their products quali... I mean costs. Their costs.
@@Notmyname1593 This here. Anyone with an even remotely dangerous hobby knows that when it comes to safety, you get what you pay for.
Industrial strength cost cutting like this is dangerous and immoral.
Air bangs have only been around since the mid 90s
@@jacobfleming565 factually incorrect but as standard yes.
Not a mistake. Deliberate decision. They knew; they hid the problem.
It's not like other choices in propellant weren't available; they went cheap, and *stayed* cheap once they knew it was problematic.
I like this new series! You can keep quite busy with only automotive scandals. Like the Suzuki samurai scandal. I owned two of them and never tipped mine over, or ever came close. If you watched the 60 minutes report, you could become convinced that a mouse fart from 50 feet away might tip the thing over! Many experts said that the "rollover simulation rig" that they bolted to it made the vehicle unstable, leading to the dramatic "rollover" footage. I would love to see what you could dig up on this subject. Keep up the great work!!!
They were paid to make it look that way by some American csr companies.
That was a hatchet job from day one.
I was unaware of a 60 Minutes report on the Samurai. But the most commonly known hit piece from Consumer Reports/Consumer Union was completely staged. Someone who hasn't even a normal track/test driver had to get in and be erratic as hell with wheel inputs to the the Samurai on two wheels. It was actually one of the most stable vehicles tested despite being on of the narrowest and tallest vehicles tested. There's a video here on UA-cam with the evidence under the name Suzuki v. Consumers Union. They also tried to do the same with Isuzu a few years later and there's a similar video for that one.
My SIL had one. They loved it, and she opined that part of the problem was behind the steering wheel - people who should never have gone off-roading thought they knew what they were doing.
@@WatanabeNoTsuna. not even close, in fact GM sued the piss out of Dateline/NBC over their staged report on the Square body Chevy trucks with saddle tanks
The Takata reca is still ongoing here and they ran out of replacements at one point so they were replacing the old Takatas with new Takatas that will still need to be replaced again, but at least the newer ones are less likely to fail since age is a factor, but they still need to be replaced again so those vehicles are marked as not having a complete recall performed.
Did they at least toss in some silica gel that time?
Excuse me what they're still making this airbag? Why it's bad?
@@everythingpony Ikr! They're alright when they're new but they have a high failure rate when they reach a certain age, so they just put a newer one in and recall the vehicle again once the new bag gets towards the failure age 🙃
24:06 why they do the mannequin like that 😭😭😭
If every episode of this series is as fascinating, it will be a great addition to the channel.
Thank you
1:03
Dear Plainly,
Your Car is
Fucked.
Luv Honda
xxx
i just love the short summary of what the letter told
The money game, and blaming game happens all to much. Being an ex Radio Shack manager, I trusted no employer and recorded all work days regardless. I was actually the first to expose Tandy with their unemployment fraud years ago. Watching my district manager getting handcuffed and arrested for tampering with payroll, still puts a smile on me, years later. A contractor I worked for, cut costs and even modified tests so what failed wouldn't show up, and the blame game resulted in technicians being fired to demonstrate the company took action, then hired back after said contract ended. I was one of them that was a lead technician but instead of returning, made the company pay for my new college courses so I could work for better paying companies, and never return to that hire fire rehire nightmare. Wasn't hard to do once I played the recordings and gave copies of all my projects. I copied all work, and the presidents of the companies signature on them, opened their eyes that I wasn't going to be used as a pawn for their blame games. Most of that companies plants are closed today, and only one seems to exist now. Karma served.
Literally turning your steering wheel into a claymore mine on impact - unbelievable not a single engineer/chemist didn't foresee this.
Ammonium nitrate is probably the most well understood explosive in use today due to the shear volumes of it that are used globally.
They did, but management didn't care
This is a unique topic, and I think a great direction for an offshoot of Plane Difficult. I made a suggestion for an episode on the OdWalla apple juice recall due to an e-coli breakout that killed several children. The military had looked to give them a contract, but their tests showed an extremely high bacterial count which the company didn't address until the children became seriously ill.
Waiting for the inevitable should be criminal. If corporations are people for political donation purposes. They she be able to go to prison as well. If there's a couple people who would be held accountable in every case, I expect people in that position wouldn't go along to get along or overlook corruption
My senior in my college was one of the victims that are fatally wounded from the said faulty airbag. It happened during the recall time and she haven't send her Honda City for the replacement and got into the accident. The airbag propelled too hard it snapped her neck, instantly ended her life. Such an unfortunate event.
I actually used to work at one of the companies making airbag inflators for Honda some time after the recall and they talked briefly about Takata during orientation. I hated that job so much, but no matter how fed up I was I NEVER even thought about turning a blind eye when it came to quality! It's just not right!! I have no idea how these people at Takata could just not care 😔
the japanese work environment encourages things like this because arguing with those up top is discouraged even if they're wrong and miscommunication is quite an issue
they don't even teach about their role in ww2 because saving face is so important.
Did you quit right after you saw the airbag Problem?
Just a theory, but the more sociopathic you are, the more likely you are to reach positions of control and power. The human race is often destined to be ruled by its worst.
Any future Scandal episode suggestions? I’d love to know!
You should talk about bmws 18 dollar a month subscription for their heated seats
Dieselgate would be good, I think
Firestone tires and the SUV rollovers.
M16 in Vietnam. It's a fascinating story of military procurement being run by people who actively wanted it to fail.
Side saddle gas tanks in Chevy pickups
I have two anecdotes to share about my Takada recalls!
My 2001 Mercedes SLK had its airbag replaced before I bought it in 2017, but the airbag is the whole-ass center of the steering wheel and it's obviously not a steering wheel shape they make any more. When I saw the recall sticker I thought, "did they remanufacture old ones or did they dust off the original molds and make new ones?" It's my understanding that supply issues for replacements have held up many recalls, obviously not helped by the fact the manufacturer declared bankruptcy.
Story #2: In 2019 I bought a used 2011 Mercedes GLK from a Mercedes dealership. Interestingly, not only had the previous owner not replaced the defective airbag, but it didn't occur to the dealer to check for recalls BEFORE putting the car up for sale, so they sold it to me with a defective airbag.
I only found out it still needed the recall when I brought the vehicle in for service and they did a standard check for recalls.
I was t-boned in my dad's Honda Ridgeline (my Accord was in pieces in the driveway at the time) the side curtains and the main airbags went off. None of it touched me. This was before we got the truck in for the recall. I feel beyond lucky that I was uninjured (plus the guy who hit me was an unlicensed driver, so the cops had a field day with him especially after he pretended he couldn't understand English when the police showed up)
We successfully mounted the claimore to your steering wheel. Great success!
The cost of the recall was compounded by the fact that Takata (or at least the Infinitis that I work on) had begun replacing them early. They began replacing the oldest units on the road with new units of the defective design just to minimize the risk of fatality, until an updated part was released. There were so many M35 and FX35 vehicles that got Takata recalls done twice.
" Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. " - That Fight club quote never gets old...
I don't believe I've mentioned recently that I absolutely love your sense of humour and how you make all of your videos funny enough to stick out inside my head while informative enough for me to remember what the video was actually about. Your narration style is 10/10 and I really enjoy your videos :)
Had my Volkswagen Beetle 2012 have these replaced. I never knew just how deadly these things were. Thanks for making this video.
12:35 “not like in the UK where you drive from one wet place to another”
LMFAO
As for ANY recall for ANY product (especially more dangerous machines like road cars and heavy equipment), people should check if their product is affected and attempt repairs, whether DIY or the proper method of returning for maintenance, of the affected part. Yet so many people in the US just throw away the big, red "URGENT RECALL" letters under the premise "I'm not letting a stealership touch my car!" or "I don't care if that breaks!".
Bruh. The airbags are extra splody and can be accidentally set off. In the case of my Mazda, the fuel pump rings have had reports of leaking fuel. There have been a few reports of fires, but mostly just customers claiming smelling fuel from the cabin or having emmisions codes thrown for vacuum leaks in the fuel tank.
Being so young, I knew of the takata recall. It was just a nostalgic news story until I was reading the requirements of my driving test. My car couldn't be subject to recall, and especially not the takarta airbag recall. Thankfully it doesn't seem like takata airbags were ever fitted in my car. But it hit me then how serious this must have been for it to be a specifically named requirement. Looking a bit now I realise so many people have just not had it fixed. Idk I wouldn't like to be driving around with a weapon ik my car. Seems that now in 2022 Australian states are cancelling vehicle registrations that have not provided proof of replacement.
I always ride around with my Glock.
@@Thor-Orion the perfect weapon to defend yourself against a dangerous exploding airbag.
I spent a lot of my childhood with a takata grenade in front of my face
I experienced this with my 2012 Honda Jazz. First the driver’s side airbag, then some time later the passenger’s. I uploaded a scanned copy of the letter to Twitter and still have the originals, because it was hard to believe what I was reading. The disasters that could happen to me if they airbag deployed sounded like an April Fool.
a friend i had growing up died recently from a takata airbag incident, the civic his dad gave him got recalled but they never had it fixed, so its great to see a video explaining this thing in full.. thanks
So sorry for your loss.
and uh...sorry about your loss reznov. I'm hastenly trying to contact family members who own old honda cars.
@@FreightmareFTW Piss off,
You gotta love it when companies try to cut corners at the expense of lives. Those people didn’t deserve to die and they should’ve still been living
"How many millions did we make today? Many? How many people died, 7 what the f- oh theyre poor? Lol no threat keep going babyyy"
Considering the amount of disasters concerning ammonium nitrate in history, the ones in charge must have been real sociopathic on top of worrying about profit margins to use that chemical for these "hand grenade bags".
As someone who works at a GM dealership it almost feels like this recall will go on and on and on. 07-13 Chevy Silverado Tahoe Suburban / GMC Sierra Yukon / Cadillac Escalade have the recalled Takata airbags on the passenger side and I've lost count how many inflators I've replaced in the last few years and the number of them rolling in the shop regularly doesn't seem to be slowing any time soon.
On a sidenote GM has also just issued a new recall on certain 14+ trucks for the roof airbags, IDK the manufacturer but I think they too have a habit of exploding.
Now if only they would recall those same trucks as well as the Yukon/Yukon XL, Tahoe Escalade/Escalade ESV and Suburban for the cracked dashboards that usually starts at the top left corner of the passenger airbag. Because my dad has a 2009 Silverado that had its airbag replaced, and the dash is cracked right at the top left corner of the airbag; thankfully it hasn’t progressed any further, but I have seen vehicles that are just as bad as the early 2000s dodge rams where large chunks of the dash are missing.
My Grand Cherokee (from Canada) also !
@@digitalrailroader I'd say it comes down to "it not being a major safety concern" for the cracked dashes (you know companies and wanting to save their pennies on a technicality). I'd say probably 90-95% of those trucks have cracked dashes and I know that when we do those airbag recalls the service advisors must log whether or not the dashboards are cracked beforehand.
My family has a 97 Dodge and the entire top of the dash had disintegrated, just blowing on it would make pieces fall off. Luckily though I did manage to find a reproduction top to fix it (it really needed the whole dash but so far there doesn't seem to be replacements of those out there).
Like bad caps on '00s motherboards and video cards. Yikes.
Non disclosure agreements should be outlawed immediately.
Absolutely evil stuff.
Funny how the subjects of the videos changed but the root of the disaster is the usual "cutting costs". That never changes. You could even say that it`s a classic.
But nobody made them switch to the more expensive propellant in the first place? They created the problem, then instead of just going back to the previous way, implemented an absolute disaster of a "fix."
@@joez.2794 Suppose they figured that since the earlier mix was rather abrasive they would have to swich out eventually anyway.
@@Notmyname1593 Good point, tho at least if they'd waited until then they might have had a chance at some sympathy and/or even more favorable treatment by the NHTSA.
I was in a freeway accident in a civic from a few years after the ones in question. 10/10. I ran away from the accident. Just out of danger, not from the cops. I was physically able to run seconds after my civic was hit by an extra large pick up that was towing a load. Car was totaled, the guy who hit me and the guy my car was pushed into both came away worse then me. Shout out to the Honda crumple zone engineers they save lives.
Same for my
Wife, hit at 65 mph from a texting driver. Walked away with just the basic common whiplash and confusion. One year later to the week, she was hit again, and again her Honda was totaled but she and our dog and cat came out unscathed.
Same for me. I was at a complete stop on the freeway when a texting driver hit me (he claims he fell asleep). I saw him coming from a distance away in my mirror. I just put my hands at 10 and 2, shifted to neutral, rested my head against the headrest, foot on the brake and clutch, and waited. All happened in a few seconds, but plenty of time to prepare and wait for the inevitable. Rear end crushed in all the way to the front seats, but the doors could still open for me to get out.
I miss that car. Lots of happy memories
@@JoshuaTootell You're lucky there wasn't an explosion! (gas tank or fuel line)
@@JoshuaTootell What car was it? You said crushed all the way to the front seats so I assume it was a 2 door.
Flipped my 90s civic from a nail in my tire. Weirdly, airbag didn’t deploy but I didn’t even get whiplash. Whole thing was crazy, car was totaled but yeah anything else probably wouldn’t have held up -also, I had coincidentally had my window down which was the only way I was later able to exit the car (the hood was crushed in) stability definitely 10/10
I used to make the airbags that were replacing the Takata airbags, in training they showed us a bunch of videos of people who had been injured by the bad ones. It was rough.