Submitted by ahm713 t3_y35ori in todayilearned
I had those in one of my old cars. They announced the recall, then they were like we need to think about this for 6 months. Then they didn't have enough replacements.
I ended up in a queue basically for 9 months where the dealers only advice was "don't get in an accident".
I mean, it's not terrible as advice goes. Just not very helpful when there's a time bomb in your steering wheel.
Can't you disable the airbag?
Maybe but the issue was that moisture got inside the inflator, making it unstable and explode when activated.
That's what the article says it was. Also supposedly exploded with an unaccounted-for amount of force, shredding the metal canister and flinging the shreds out at the person's face.
Yes, very easily
I’m sure you are still way safer with it on and the possibility of it cutting your throat then having nothing but steering wheel to cushion your head. If the fatalities were that common it would have happened much sooner than 8 years after the 2001 Accord came out. It’s obviously still dangerous to possibly have that issue, but considering how many cars they produced it only effected a small percent of them.
Edit: Downvote if you want, but I have no clue why. Please enlighten me why my opinion is wrong. It killed 24 people over 10 plus years with at least 19.4M airbags effected, that number is minuscule. I’m not saying that the faulty airbags are good enough, I’m just saying you are safer with this airbag that is faulty than disconnecting it as the person above me said.
It took 8 years because the problem with it was the degradation of the parts. Not that they were faulty from the start. And there were much more injuries, just because they didn’t all die doesn’t mean the airbag wasn’t extremely dangerous. Not all crashes are fatal but that doesn’t mean they were better off with a faulty safety feature. The fact that anyone died means they’re not better off with a faulty airbag that might slash your major arteries or maybe “just” further injure you.
Here is a more recent article than the 19.4M cited before, it’s from September 2021.
“Through various announcements, the recall has grown to include 67 million airbags from more than 42 million vehicles in the U.S.” “To date, there have been 19 deaths and more than 400 injuries because this problem in the U.S. Worldwide, NHTSA reports that there have been at least 27 deaths.”
Putting all of the casualties together the odds of being injured are 0.00064%, that number is insanely small. If there is that chance the airbag will randomly kill you but a 30% increased chance of it saving your life or prevent major injury in a serious accident than you are better off with it than without.
> The fact that anyone died means they’re not better off with a faulty airbag that might slash your major arteries or maybe “just” further injure you.
That’s not how statistics work, when dealing with 64M airbags did they save more people than they harmed, based on all the data on air bags they saved more people. Different article I read this morning said 2,750 peoples lives were saved in the US by airbags in 2016 alone, that’s a hundred times more people saved in a year than faulty airbags killed in the 20ish years of the issue. I’m not saying the company shouldn’t recall them, I’m just saying have a faulty airbag is better than no airbag and the numbers back that up.
Are you an antivaxxer? There is an incredibly small chance the Covid vaccine can kill you, like any vaccine, but the odds are so insanely low that it’s worth the risks. There will always be at least one person who will die from it that wouldn’t have anyway and that’s just the odds that we live with when we are talking about billions of people. We are absolutely safer with the vaccine and losing a few people than we are with horrible viruses running around unchecked.
My first car had no airbag, from the factory. I'd have looked into disabling it until they had a fix
I mean- if you are wearing a seatbelt I would rather just deal with the wheel. Airbags are relatively new when it comes to driving. I think you just perceive no airbag as a much bigger threat because you are young.
Early windshields were made of glass so in accidents they cut people to shreds, just because safety glasses is newer doesn’t make it less safe. We are is much safer in cars than we ever were before, airbags save lives. Just like seatbelts, there’s always a person who says well not wearing one saved my life, but they are the exception not the rule.
“Front airbags reduce driver fatalities in frontal crashes by 29 percent and fatalities of front-seat passengers age 13 and older by 32 percent”
https://www.iihs.org/topics/airbags
That means you are significantly safer with airbags. The deaths from this recall are tragic, but they are a very small number one, the vast majority of people with those cars were safer with faulty airbags than without.
It’s also not just fatalities that matter, it reduces the risk of serious injury too. I’d rather hit an airbag and break an arm than hit the steering wheel or glovebox and break 9 different bones and have my face smashed in, even if I don’t die in either situation.
Yup, Reddit never ceases to amaze me, show them actual evidence and they are just like nah. The faulty airbags killed 1 in a million people, there is no way that airbags didn’t save more than 1 person per million. Oh where I came up with that 19.4M number was from an old article, it has grown to 67M with 27 confirmed fatalities and 400 injuries. There is absolutely no way people are safer with a disconnected airbag than one of the ones being recalled.
It's one of the largest recalls ever, and they didn't even have a fix at first. The failure is due to degradation so at the start of the recall the procedure was to replace it with another faulty part, so that at least people wouldn't die while they tried to figure out how to fix it right.
Edit: largest automotive recall ever
This was crazy. For whatever reason only our passenger side airbag was impacted, so I rode in the back while my husband drove for months while we waited to get the airbag replaced on our '07 Impreza.
For the early stages of the recall they replaced the dodgy airbags with a newer one with the same flaw, it takes several years for the problem to build up to dangerous levels, as they didn't have safer replacements.
They needed to buy some time for other airbag suppliers to produce enough to replace one of the biggest manufacturers of airbags.
I was surprised they recalled my 1999 Acura CL over this in 2020. I plan on keeping it until they need to replace the airbag again just so I can go into the dealer and complain that they just don’t make cars like they used to.
When it comes to human safety from the manufacturer, they are responsible forever, as long as the consumer has not altered them. I love your idea about your 99 Acura, "they just don't make cars like they used to." LoL 🤣
The flaws also weren't consistent, so most places did a tiered replacement starting with the riskiest ones.
Dealers for a while had waivers that said if you have a passenger in the car, you promise to put them in the back seat
The fuck?
Ok so this is a weird one. Basically as someone else said in another thread, the company that made the airbag inflators made a lot of them for a lot of automakers for a long time.
Prior to other companies being able to produce the inflators for permanent replacement, you had a handful of options for your car until autoliv and other companies got the necessary inflators
-Dont drive the car, leaving it either at home or on a dealer's lot
-drive the car on your own at your own risk(you could still file a suit if injured, the waiver merely acknowledged the risks were explained to you)
-be put in a rental for an unknown period of time(Honda exhausted enterprise's rental inventory at one point)
-put a new version of the defective airbag to reset the failure timer(heat, time and humidity being the most responsible for airbag failure)
-some folks went as far to disconnect the inflator entirely
It resulted in weird situations where honda dealers had vehicle owners swear with sugar on top that if they drove a car because the other options were exhausted or they couldn't be without their car, and they had passengers, they'd endeavor to put the passenger in the back seat which very likely ensured maybe a little more protection
I worked in the field for Honda on this kind of stuff, it was a very interesting few years
Edit: Love your username, that is a fantastic book
That makes a lot more sense! Thanks for the info! And yeah, it’s a truly eye opening book.
My Honda dealer had a backlog of replacements too and they gave me a nice replacement vehicle while I was waiting for the part to come in.
Thats when I go to my local car guy and tell him to take this shit out. Id rather have no airbag than a grenade.
I worked at a honda dealership during this time and i replaced crazy amounts of these. I would have days and days of just these replacements to the point it felt like an assembly line work. Something alot of people dont realize is that we had to send all the old ones back and they all had special paperwork because your basically messing with a mini claymore mine and they had to be disposed of properly. The logistics was insane. Honda basically started an airbag factory just to handle thier load.
I had a car that had a defect that would make it catch fire. The third time they recalled it they just said to not park in or under anything until they figure something out.
My parents had the Explorer with the Firestone recall. I think that killed like 800 people and same thing, Ford's advice.
Maintain air pressure (fair enough).
Don't drive when it is hot.
Like how someone doesn't do jail time for these is amazing.
Mine was a 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix. A whole bunch of other cars had the same engine, my sister had an 03 Bonneville. Didn't get recalled the first time until like 2010 at least, might've been later. It was a pretty regular occurrence that people's car's were spontaneously combusting, too. Mine had caught fire a few rimes, I thought it overheated at the time. There was also parts melted that no one could figure out.
Apparently there was something wrong with where you fill the oil. If you came to a hard stop or were even just going downhill, oil would leak onto the exhaust manifold and catch fire. My sister checked her oil while getting gas and discovered hers on fire. She frantically blew it out.
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I don't think I was ever able to get mine fixed. Eventually traded the car in so it's someone else's problem now
I really hope you told them about it, otherwise that would be kinda fucked up.
These things are easily looked up via the cars VIN. It was sold to a big car dealer so they can deal with the "lack of available parts" to fix it.
Probably illegal. I don't think you can legally sell a car with a recall without fixing it. Or at least dealers
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