It is been decided that the airbags made by Takata in almost 34,000,000 United States vehicles are defective. http://www.cbsnews.com/... That means those vehicles will be recalled to have their airbags replaced. What could go wrong?
I'm surprised how scant and superficial the reporting on this has been so far, so I've tried to come up with some "ballpark" estimates of the possible cost and public safety impact. If anyone sees errors in my math or can offer refinements to my estimates and wild guesses, I'll be grateful for enlightenment.
Here's a link to the NHTSA's new web site where you can enter a vehicle serial number and see if there's a recall on it. https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/... (By the way, I found those numbers for my family's cars on the proof of insurance that I carry in my wallet. It's a convenient place to look.)
It is been decided that the airbags made by Takata in almost 34,000,000 United States vehicles are defective. http://www.cbsnews.com/... That means those vehicles will be recalled to have their airbags replaced. What could go wrong? (I’m not an expert in auto safety, but as a doctor specializing in internal medicine, I’m in the habit of asking what could go wrong.)
Plenty could go wrong. The replacements will almost surely be safer, but they won’t be perfect. Further, some small fraction of the new installations will be done in a defective manner. The original airbags installed at the factory when a car is built could also be installed in a defective manner, but it stands to reason that re-installations, done at multiple auto dealerships across the country, would have more defects. If the airbags are recalled and replaced in 34 million vehicles, at least a few people will be involved in accidents in which the airbag should deploy but don’t. A good fraction of those unfortunate people whose airbags failed to deploy will be more severely injured in the accident, and a small fraction can be expected to die. How many is that? It’s an easy question to ask, but to come up with an estimate we have to make some wild guesses.
There are roughly 260 million vehicles on the road in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/... The 34 million with Takata air bags are about 13% of that total. There are about 25,000 deaths a year of vehicle occupants from accidents. Let’s guess that the death rate would double for passengers whose air bags fail to deploy. Let’s assume all 34 million of those Takata air bags get replaced, but make a wild guess that one in 10,000 replacements will be defective over whatever baseline number come out of the factory defective. (I think that guess is fairly flattering to the nation’s mechanics.) That means 13% of the accidents would be in cars with replaced air bags, and 0.0013% would be in cars with defectively installed air bags. 0.0013% of 25,000 is 0.325. So the estimate is that one person every 3 years would die from the “cure” for the problem.
The defective airbags have been linked to at least five deaths in the U.S., Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said last Tuesday, and more than 100 injuries nationwide. It’s not clear over how many years those deaths have happened, and it’s not clear if five deaths is the majority of all the ones caused by the defective air bags, or just the tip of the iceberg, or somewhere in between. If the 0.325 deaths a year estimate of deaths that the recall might cause is in the right ballpark, I agree with our Secretary of Transportation that the recall will save lives – and injuries, too. But if we guess that one in 1000 installations will be defective, rather than one in 10,000, then we’re looking at 3.25 deaths a year caused by the recall – a number in the same ballpark as the deaths caused by the defect. I think one in 1000 installations being defective is overly pessimistic, but I wouldn’t be astonished if it turns out to be the actual result. Or worse. And if one in 100 installations is defective, the estimate becomes 32.5 deaths a year, which is almost surely worse than just leaving those air bags alone. I hope Transportation Secretary Foxx has something to go on so his guesses aren’t as wild as mine; I wish some reporter would ask him about that.
Next, let’s take a guess at the cost, something I haven’t seen in any of the news reports I have read or heard about this. One estimate says that the total cost for professionally replacing airbags that deployed in a collision can be $1000-$6000 or more, but averages $3000-$5000. http://cars.costhelper.com/... When airbags deploye in an accident they usually cause some interior damage to the car; some are even expected to break the windshield as part of the mechanism of protecting the passengers. Electively replacing airbags that have not deployed ought to be somewhat less expensive, and a huge recall might involve some economies of scale, but it’s hard to imagine that the price for replacing all the airbags in a vehicle could possibly be under $1000. 34 million times $1000 is $34 billion. Takata would likely go bankrupt if it had to shoulder that cost, or even a significant fraction of it. The big auto makers are likely to end up paying for a lot of the recall, and they’ll probably make their dealers do the repairs at cut rate prices. I hope that won’t lead to cut rate workmanship. Again, I wish some reporter had looked into the question of what will this cost and who’s going to pay for it.
Is it worth the money? Well, I’ll try to think like an economist. Let’s guess that a skilled mechanic can replace the airbags on two cars in an eight hour day, or about 500 cars a year. That means we’d be adding 68,000 man years of work to the economy. That would mean full time work for 20,000 skilled mechanics for 3.4 years. That sounds like a worthwhile economic stimulus to me.
One useful thing that might come out of this is that the transportation safety people will have millions of removed Takata air bags they can experiment with, that should be free for the asking. High humidity is one factor they think is making some of them go off for no reason – it can make the ammonium nitrate explosive unstable. For example, they could test airbags from cars that were used someplace humid like Florida and compare to airbags from Arizona cars. They might learn something useful about how to use ammonium nitrate, an inexpensive explosive, safely; or they might convince us it’s impossible and ammonium nitrate should never be used as an explosive that can be stored for years.