The Most Expensive Design Flaw In History

Not to sound dramatic, but your car might be a ticking time bomb. I'm not kidding. Since 1998, all cars sold in the United States have been required to have airbags, and they've been remarkably successful at reducing uh crash fatalities. It's estimated that over 50,000 people have had their lives saved by airbags since they started. This is a technology that we all rely on to keep us safe. And yet right now there are literally millions of cars on the road with airbags that are just as likely to kill you as save you. Through a combination of greed, corporate callousness, and ineptitude, one of the largest airbag manufacturers in the world built and sold faulty airbags over the course of nearly 20 years. Airbags that not only failed to prevent injuries, but directly caused them. And these airbags ended up in over a hundred million cars. The scandal that came out of this rocked the industry and cost the company $26 billion. It's the most expensive recall in history. So, when I picked this topic, I honestly had no idea what I was getting into. I just thought it was an interesting question. You know, what was the most expensive recall ever? I honestly had no idea how bad this was. Like, it started with, "Oh, no, bad airbags. " And it ended with an explosion so big it flattened entire blocks of a town in South Texas. This story is insane, and it might actually impact you. So stick around cuz we're going to talk about the Takata airbag scandal, the biggest product recall in history. In 2009, two people were picking up kids from football practice in Oklahoma City. While tooling around the parking lot looking for an exit, one of them got distracted and they wound up having a little fender bender. One of them got out of the car, probably annoyed. You know, he was probably going to be late for dinner now. God knows how much this repair is going to cost, all that. The other one didn't get out of her car. She just sat there. So, he got out his insurance information, got out of his car, walked over to the driver's side of the other car, you know, kind of wondering what her deal was. And when he got there, what he saw was a woman bleeding all over the place. Her face looked like she'd been shot with a shotgun. And next to her in the passenger seat was her younger brother crying and holding her, screaming for help. Like, imagine being that guy. You know, you probably would think that she got shot or something. And maybe the shot happened before the accident because there's no way that the accident could have caused that. It was a tiny little fender bender. In fact, maybe that's what caused the accident was her getting shot. Suddenly, this whole thing became something else entirely. The driver's name was Ashley Parm, an 18-year-old cheerleader from Oklahoma City, and within minutes, she was pronounced dead on the scene. The medical examiner report said that something had sliced open her corateed artery, causing her to bleed out and pass away. They also thought maybe she was shot, but the metal that they pulled out of her neck, it wasn't a bullet. It was shrapnel. One look at the bloody airbag gave them the clue they needed. Because there were holes in the airbag, but the holes didn't come from the outside, they came from the inside. On that day, Ashley Pum became the first death in the Takata airbag scandal. The Takata Corporation began in 1933 as a textile manufacturer in Japan, making parachutes during World War II. They eventually shifted to making seat belts in the early 1950s. So, they became a bit of a name around car safety equipment, and as airbags became more popular, they moved into making them. Airbags started popping up in cars literally around the 1970s, but the first designs go all the way back to the 1950s. An inventor and engineer named John W. Hedrickk patented the first ever prototype for airbags in 1953. Yeah, I was kind of inspired by a crash that he had the previous year. He was riding around Newport, Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter and uh he swerved to miss a rock and went into a ditch. Nobody was hurt, but it did give him an idea. What if he could invent something that would come out and prevent somebody from smashing into the steering wheel? And the first airbab was born. By the 1970s, airbags were increasingly offered as an option by car companies like GM and Ford. And in the beginning, they all kind of made their own airbags. But in the 80s, several companies like Takata stepped up and started mass-producing them third party. Congress passed the Intermoal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991, which required all new cars and light trucks to come with airbags on both the passenger and the driver's side. It became a mandatory feature in 1998. So, by the turn of the 2000s, Tcata was putting their airbags in tens of millions of cars. They were one of the top airbag manufacturers on Earth. They serve dozens of different car brands. They were huge. Here's how airbags work. They're basically made up of three parts. The bag, which is made of thin nylon and like folds into the steering wheel and passenger side dashboard, as well as a seat in the doors. A crash sensor located in the steering column that has an accelerometer built into it. And it's usually programmed to trigger the inflation system around 30 to 35 mph. The third part, last but not least, is the inflator. And this is the tricky part. The inflator has to walk a delicate tight rope. It's got to fill the airbag extremely fast in a matter of milliseconds. That bag has to fly out at like 200 mph. But it's flying right at your face, so it can't be too forceful. You get a concussion just from the airbag. There are, by the way, tiny holes in the bag, so it gives way a little bit when you hit it. And um also so it can completely deflate after the accident. You're not just stuck with a giant bag in front of your face. But the point is, it has to be like right in

that sweet spot, you know, explosive but soft. Also fairly important, uh, the gas that it fills that airbag with has to be non-toxic. Like, no sense preventing a head injury if you're just going to nerf your lungs with chlorine. So, they needed something that would be explosive and produce an inert gas, like say nitrogen. The earliest airbags did this with a mixture of sodium aside and potassium nitrate. Turns out though, that the exhaust that they produce actually is a bit toxic. So, they replaced that later on with a compound called tetrazole, but that was a lot more expensive. So in the '90s, Takata started buying up companies basically to obtain their patents. They were looking for something that could do the same job as tetrazole but cheaper. One of those companies happened to be a rocket research facility in Washington that worked with ammonium nitrate. Takata's VP of inflator development basically retweaked one of those patents that he got and he created what he called a high gas yield non-azide gas generate and pushed to use ammonium nitrate in their airbags. Now anybody in here who follows space stuff even just a little bit is well aware of ammonium nitrate. It's using a lot of solid rocket boosters, including the ones on the space shuttle and the SLS. And that's basically what this inflation system is. It's like a tiny little solid rocket booster that just pushes exhaust out one end and inflates a bag. And on paper, they sound pretty good. It's relatively stable. It's way less expensive, and it's more powerful. More powerful means you can make smaller inflators. That's less resources per unit, less cost to ship per unit, no toxic gases. Win-win-win. So, what are the disadvantages of using ammonium nitrate? Well, — are you serious? — Yeah. — This shuttle mission will launch. — My god. — Altitude. — Yeah. Uh, when I said relatively stable earlier, the word relatively was carrying a lot of weight. In fact, it was the cause of the worst industrial accident in US history. In Texas City, Texas, in 1947, a guy on a ship docked at port just kind of flung a cigarette and that cigarette started a fire next to 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate. They were packaged in paper bags. The blast that it created actually set off a chain reaction, blowing up a ship next to it that was also carrying tons of ammonium nitrate. Petroleum plants and refineries caught fire for miles in every direction. And it actually knocked people to the ground on Galveston Island, 10 miles away. In the end, that one toss cigarette killed over 500 people. So, let's put that in our steering wheels. And look, the engineers at Takato weren't stupid. They knew full well about the explosive nature of ammonium nitrate. The executives at Takata knew about it cuz they had a quality control team of engineers telling them it was dangerous. One of them even got injured when an inflator exploded during a car fire test. It turns out that was actually ammonium nitrate's big flaw. Like it couldn't handle extreme temperatures. And even mild temperature swings cause problems. Ammonium nitrate becomes particularly unstable when moisture gets into it. and swings in temperature and humidity can make condensation form and that can break down the fuel. The whole point of solid fuel is that it burns evenly. So, it goes in the direction you want all out the exhaust, right, to fill out the bag. And unstable fuel that's been exposed to moisture, it doesn't burn evenly. And the force of it can go in directions you don't want. Sometimes ripping the housing apart and sending that out of shrapnel. And Takata's solution to the moisture problem, desicants. Yeah. Yeah, you know those little desk packs that they put in packages to absorb the moisture? They always say do not eat. Yeah, those. By the way, they put do not eat on there because people apparently are still eating those things. Stop doing that. So, Takata tried to put a band-aid on the problem and call it a day. Maybe they thought that, you know, that would solve the problem. Maybe they thought the testing results were overblown. Or maybe they're just a multinational corporation with a patent on a product that was scheduled to go into millions of cars with stockholders and customers to answer to at the end of the day. But mostly stockholders. So they covered it up. Not only buried the reports of the exploding inflators, they went so far as to close down the lab investigating the problem. The people who tried to warn them about it basically had no choice but to lead the company. From 2000 to 2008, Takata provided these airbags to some of the biggest auto manufacturers, installing them in over 70 million cars. And for a few years, things were going fine until they weren't. The first reported airbag rupture happened in May 2004 in Alabama. The following year, three Takata airbags ruptured in Honda vehicles. Then in 2009 is when Ashley Parm died from one of the faulty airbags. Parm's death prompted Honda to issue a recall of 500,000 airbags in its vehicles. A few months later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or Nitsa, they finally got involved, but their investigation just only focused on Honda and their

actions, and they found that Honda acted responsibly. Nitsa wouldn't focus on Takata until 2014 when two other cases of people dying from flying shrapnel and minor car accidents happened. Takata stonewalled and refused to cooperate at first. Nitsa actually had to issue a $14,000 per day fine against them for every day that they failed to respond to information requests. Then after the 10th reported death caused by an airbag, Takata finally started taking it seriously. Um, not seriously enough to actually fix the problem, but enough to cover their asses. They decided to form an independent panel to investigate the problem. And to lead it, they shelled out the money to hire former transportation secretary Samuel Skinner. — The panel's conclusion was that Takata had uh no quality control testing and safety procedures. That's not good. This was actually the first time that Takata was officially blamed for releasing faulty airbags, which is actually kind of amazing. Instead of spending the money to fix the problem, they spent God only knows how much money for a consultant uh trying to make them look better, and that consultant only made them look worse. So, after that, Takado was forced to issue a recall of 35 to 40 million inflators. They had to contact every person who had a car with their inflator in it and have them go to a dealership to have it replaced with a new, more expensive, but safer inflator. And millions of people took their cars in. Finally, they did the right thing by taking these tiny pipe bombs off the road. Problem solved. Except now, what do you do with 40 million miniature pipe bombs? Millions of drivers were taking their cars in every day and Takata inflators started piling up in dealerships and repair shops. And the way Takata chose to ship those back to the waste facilities was um to just ship them not on specialized explosive containment equipment, just on regular unfortified shipping trucks, literally like FedEx trucks. For some reason, they were not scheduled as class one explosive freight. Even though a study showed that one semi-truck full of inflators would have five times the amount of explosives as was used on the federal building in Oklahoma City and all that's just driving around on the highway right in the middle of cities and there were thousands of them. There's a great documentary here on YouTube called The Ticking Time Bomb. I'll link it down below, but it follows a guy named John Kelly who's kind of on a mission to get these off the road. At one point in the documentary, he visits a repair shop uh to see how they were handling the inflators. — 250 inflators were being pulled out of cars, put into cardboard boxes, saran wrapped on a pallet, and shipped. — The documentary then follows him lobbying the Department of Transportation to get them to reclassify the inflators as class one hazardous material. But he kept running into brick walls, kept running into bureaucracy. So he goes around collecting these inflators so he could like document them uh exploding in tests. He actually heated them up with toaster ovens. It's all very interesting, but it's also frustrating because every day that they delayed doing something about it is more likely that some kind of accident might happen. Then an accident happened. — The blast leveled a home, shooting pieces of the tractor trailer and its contents up to a mile. — On August 22nd, 2016, a truck operated by a Takata subcontractor exploded while driving through the town of Komado, Texas. It leveled the house of Lucilia Robles, who died in the explosion. The truck's engine was found in a different house 30 yards away. Multiple people were airlifted to San Antonio with injuries. Once again, Takata insisted it had quote strict safety procedures relating to the transportation of his products. It clearly didn't. By the way, this is super random, but quamado in Spanish means like burnt or charred in English. Weird coincidence there. On February 27th, 2017, Takata pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges for releasing its airbags and trying to cover up the knowledge that they knew that they were dangerous. The company agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal penalties, including $125 million in restitution for the victims and their families and 850 million in compensation to the automakers that provided airbags to Takata. Filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, and BMW alone agreed to a consumer settlement of $553 million that same year, which opened the door for millions more in other settlements from other car makers and manufacturers. Over 67 million airbags had to be recalled from 34 different car makers. The exploding airbags have been attributed to the deaths of at least 30 people around the world, including 24 in the United States, and an untold number of injuries. Three of Takata's executives were indicted on wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Yeah. Investigators uncovered emails where they admitted to basically filing false reports even after they learned that their inflators were causing injuries. Prosecuting those cases would require that they get extradited back to the US. And according to court records, those cases appear to still be gone going. The truly alarming part is that a lot of these defective airbags are still out there on the road. Yeah, a lot of them probably did end up in landfills and

scrapards, but you could be driving one right now and not even know it. Nitser's at least a list of cars that you probably shouldn't drive until you get them repaired. I'll put a link to it down in the description. Yeah, the majority of cars with those airbags span from the late 1990s to the mid2010s. And Nitsa also has a website where you can basically just enter your car's bend number and it'll tell you if any of the parts that you have need to be recalled. So, if you think you might have a Takata airbag, you should definitely go take a look or go take a look. Anyway, you never know what else might be a risk for you. I'll link it down below. This story is not at all what I thought it was going to be when I got into it. I thought just like, hey, interesting story about a big uh recall. I had no idea where it was going to go. So, the moral of the story here, I guess, listen to engineers people. But yeah, if you get a chance, uh, definitely go check out that documentary on the story that I kept referring to in the video. It's a crazy story. But, um, also, if you're into documentaries, there's another one I might recommend, the one I made. It feels like I'm always talking about this documentary. Um, like you guys are probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but every time I do, every time I make a post about it, I hear on the socials or whatever, I always get these comments that are like, "What is this? I've never heard of it. " So, the shameless self-promotion must flow. In 2024, I took a trip with a couple of buddies of mine to see the oldest and the newest rock formations on planet Earth. We went to the far north of the Northwest Territories in Canada, where we saw the Costa Nice complex, which is currently the oldest known rock in the world at 4. 02 billion years old. There we visited with geologists from the Smithsonian Institution who explained the area and what the world was like when this rock was formed. — I'm gonna learn so much today. — That's the plan. — Taking you all with me. Be prepared to nerd out. — Yeah. — Then we traveled to the big island of Hawaii where there we helped some USGS volcanologists to process some rock that was less than 12 hours old. We put it all together into a dare I say amazing documentary called Oldest and Newest Places on Earth. And you can see it over on Nebula. It's part travalog, part science explainer, but also part existential journey. Getting to see these two time extremes on planet Earth really gave me a perspective that was very humbling and it makes you kind of think about the extreme vastness of our world and the universe and our tiny little important place in it. I'm deeply proud of this project and I honestly think it's one of the best things I've ever done and I hope you get a chance to see it. Nebula of course is where I upload all my videos early and adree and with some extra content that you can't see here. And I'm not alone. There's like 200 thoughtful creators on Nebula, many of whom have their own exclusive content there, like 17 pages from Bobby Broccoli, which details the inside story of a massive scientific scandal. Plus, there's the Mad King series from Real Life Lore. And if it's comedy you're after, you've got to see the show Abolish Everything. So, if you go over to Nebula, you'll have a few options. If you just want to watch the movie, you can do through a one month pass that's only $6 and it gives you access to everything on Nebula for a month. Or if you sign up with my code in the description, you can get a whole year for half the annual subscription at just $30, which is like $250 a month. You can also, by the way, if you just love it that hard, get a lifetime subscription. Normally $500, but with my link down below, you can get it for $300. Basically, you can just bask in the glow of Nebula for as long as you and Nebula both exist. So, I hope you get to check it out. The link's down in the description. Um, and while you're there, you know, take the opportunity to see what other great stuff is on Nebula. Might be your new favorite thing. Just saying. All right, that's it for today. Thank you guys so much for watching. If this is your first time here, I might recommend this video that the algorithm thinks you might like. Um, go check that out or look at the sidebar if you're watching on a browser. Look at any of my old videos and uh if you enjoy them, I invite you to subscribe. I come back videos every Monday. That's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care.