Welcome to Go/No-Go. I'm Jon Bruner.

And I'm Alex Hao.

Go/No-Go is a podcast about design, engineering, manufacturing, and the calls that can make or break great products. It's brought to you by Lumafield, which makes AI-enabled manufacturing intelligence software that gives engineers total confidence in the products that they ship. This podcast comes in three different segments. Some episodes we interview a key figure from manufacturing and product development. Some episodes we talk about recent news. And in this segment, Reconstructions, we go back in history and revisit a key failure in the history of engineering. Sitting in front of us on the desk is a pretty threatening thing. What is this, Alex?

It's a Takata airbag. It has a Volkswagen logo on it, but it is a Takata airbag manufactured in Mexico — at the key plant at the center of the Takata airbag recall disaster, no less.

Alex is flinching a little bit as I hold this airbag. This was remarkably easy to buy. I bought it on eBay a couple of years ago so we could CT scan it and see what's inside. I don't enjoy holding it either, so I'm going to put it down. This has been haunting our office for the last couple of years.

What I hate about this airbag — I watched a documentary recently about the Takata airbags called Ticking Time Bomb, and there's a lot of really unfortunate graphic imagery of injuries sustained from these airbags. When I realized this was a Takata, I wanted to look up whether it's a recalled unit. I actually could not find a single way to identify that. All the recall sites want you to enter the VIN for the vehicle, but this isn't in a vehicle. We have the part number, but I am unable to take the serial number and figure out if this is the bad one or not.

That's astonishing, because there is a huge trade in replacement airbags and second-hand airbags. When cars get into accidents you need to replace the airbag module, or if a car gets scrapped for other reasons the airbag module can be taken out and put in a different car. These are quite widely traded. And the fact that the recall is tied entirely to the VIN rather than the serial number on the airbag really doesn't make a lot of sense.

It looks like there was an effort to make a website to look up the serial number — freepartcheck.com — but when you try to go there, it doesn't work. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and couldn't do it.

Maybe they've decided their work is done. What we have here is an orphaned Takata airbag that may or may not be extremely dangerous.

Just a month ago, Fiat Chrysler issued more do-not-drive warnings for vehicles that still have these Takata airbags in them.

This has been the largest and costliest recall in history. It has spanned just about every major automaker, and it continues because not everyone who has one of these airbags has brought it in to get replaced.

There was a Wall Street Journal piece we talked about on episode five of Go/No-Go that covered how about one third of automotive recalls are never brought in for service, regardless of severity — whether it's failing brakes, airbags killing people, or just a loose seatbelt buckle. There is a solid proportion of people that won't bring their car in to fix it.

In a weird way, it's a testament to the reliability of modern cars that old things don't get replaced. Service shops will check your VIN against recall databases and figure out what needs to be replaced, and they like doing the work because they get reimbursed by the automaker for recall replacement work. But I think what's happened is that cars have become so reliable that people don't bring them into a shop as often as they used to. So let's talk about how airbags actually work. We CT scanned this airbag after purchasing it, and we have an illustration here — if you're watching on video you'll see it, and if not you can check the link in the show notes and explore the scan yourself. First we can crop into the airbag and see the coiled bag itself, tightly wound inside the enclosure of the steering wheel. When we strip away the less dense materials, we can isolate the igniter. This looks like two different cavities, two different enclosures. What do you see inside them?

When we move to a slice view, we can see two different cavities with what look like pellet materials inside. These are basically two stages of igniters.

This is an incredible assembly, and the kind of thing you would not want to disassemble to inspect — it's pretty dangerous to open up. Airbags started to become common in the US in the 1990s, after a very long series of back-and-forth arguments between regulators and automakers. Seat belts had been introduced pretty widely in the 1960s, so airbags were seen as the next major evolution and also something that could address the problem of drivers and passengers not wearing seat belts. It's a supplementary restraint system that helps you avoid death or serious injury regardless of whether you're wearing a seat belt.

You shared an article about how to spot a fake airbag, and you mentioned early airbag prototypes. I'm curious about those.

In those early airbags, there was actually a tube with a ball in it. A sufficiently hard impact would cause the ball to dislodge, roll down the tube, and hit a contact that would trigger the airbag. Now they're much more sophisticated — MEMS devices and so on that can detect a crash. The way an airbag works is that it has what's called an inflator, which would normally just be called a package of explosives — but there's a euphemism in the automotive world. You call these things inflators. They're full of a chemical that decomposes into a gas very rapidly and inflates a fabric bag very, very quickly. Within 40 milliseconds from impact to full inflation.

When we look at the origin of Takata, it was founded in 1933 originally as a textile company making parachute lifelines. In 1988 they began manufacturing airbags, and by 2014 they had about 20% of the global market. Takata developed an inflator chemistry focused on ammonium nitrate. People might be more familiar with ammonium nitrate for its role in fertilizers as well as in terrorism and bomb-making.

The chemistry inside airbags has gone through some evolution. First-generation airbags used sodium azide, which produces nitrogen gas — fine in itself — but they also produce particles that can retain heat, and there were a lot of reports of passengers and drivers getting serious burns from these early airbags. Sodium azide is also very toxic. So manufacturers wanted to move on to something less toxic and less dangerous during deployment, and landed on tetrazole, a synthetic compound that is also considerably more expensive. That was the generation Takata fatefully wanted to move on from in order to reduce the cost of the propellant.

The phase-stabilized ammonium nitrate, which is the primary propellant in the Takata airbag, runs several dollars cheaper per unit than the alternatives used by competitors. In a vehicle assembly with so many stacked components, a few dollars here and there is very attractive.

Ammonium nitrate is a very high-volume chemical — the classic fertilizer-explosive hybrid. The development of the synthesis process for ammonium nitrate is one of those watershed moments in civilization because it made widespread high-output agriculture possible. At the same time, this is a chemical you hear about constantly in terrorist bombs and industrial accidents. From a cost perspective it was appealing to Takata, but it was not a very stable propellant.

Around the early 2000s, Takata starts to become aware that some of their PSAN-based inflators — phase-stabilized ammonium nitrate — are failing to meet automaker specifications and rupturing during testing. Allegedly, they falsify their test data and continue selling the airbags. There's a documented instance where a former employee confirms that a failed test result at a Georgia facility was given new barcodes to prevent tracking.

So this was not only poor quality control in the Takata manufacturing facility, but deceitful quality control.

As early as 2001, we see Honda and Acura vehicles being equipped with what will later be identified as the Alpha inflator — a subset found to be particularly dangerous as they age. Moving into 2004 to 2007, we begin to see some early rupture incidents and injuries, particularly in Honda vehicles.

How did Takata respond?

The first recall they issued was in November 2008 — their first acknowledgment that there may be a problem. But this recall is really small: only 3,940 vehicles. NHTSA began questioning why the recall was so limited, and in August 2009 started a formal inquiry. The company was of course trying to limit the spread of this because recalls are extremely expensive for suppliers. The stakes really increased in May 2009 when Ashley Parham, an 18-year-old, died in a minor fender-bender in a high school parking lot. It was an accident that should have been completely survivable, but the inflator in her 2001 Honda Accord ruptured and the shrapnel unfortunately led to her death. This was the first confirmed US fatality related to this product.

The airbag should have gone off, and it did — but it went off with an explosion that was too violent, beyond the design intent of the airbag.

And then the metal of the packaging becomes shrapnel that lacerates the occupant. We continue to see more accidents later in 2009 — Gurjit Rasoor becomes the second documented US fatality. In 2013, automakers begin larger-scale recalls. The first wave affects 3.6 million vehicles, all traced to Takata's Monclova plant in Mexico.

Which is where this airbag on the table was manufactured. So.

Yeah. Don't love that. They first publicly attribute the defect to moisture exposure — that this chemical, the PSAN, degrades over time as it's exposed to moisture and becomes more dangerous. They address this with a second-generation airbag that includes a desiccant. That first wave of larger recalls covers 3.6 million airbags, all attributed to the Monclova plant. Then in 2016 they expand to all Takata units without the desiccant — about 30 to 40 million inflators. The Department of Transportation also levies a $200 million civil fine against Takata, the largest in US automotive history at that point.

This is when the scale of the issue begins to be recognized. And it is fair to say that moisture may play a role — but the issue with ammonium nitrate is actually more fundamental. Ammonium nitrate is a crystalline substance with multiple crystal phases. As it cycles between hot summer days and cold nights, it expands and contracts and develops cracks in the crystals, which increases their surface area. The inflator has to happen within very narrow margins — if you think about what it takes to create the perfect airbag deployment, something that happens in just milliseconds without exploding too violently but still fast enough to be helpful, that's a very fine line. When the ammonium nitrate cracks and its surface area increases, that leads to faster and more erratic explosions. Moisture may play a role too — it does absorb moisture from the air, and in very hot, humid environments it could degrade even faster. There were some signs that in really hot and humid regions, the ammonium nitrate could become compromised within as little as six years.

That's why some Takata employees really pushed back on limiting the recall to only airbags without the desiccant — because they didn't feel the desiccant was sufficient, especially given how long cars stay on the road.

What happens next?

In January 2017, the DOJ charges three Takata executives with wire fraud. Takata Corporation agrees to plead guilty and pays $1 billion — $850 million to automakers, $125 million to victims, and $25 million as a federal fine. Later that year they file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They're acquired by Key Safety Systems, which rebrands as Joyson Safety Systems, and they continue to issue recall notices as they absorb that customer base.

A little bit like the incident we discussed in our last Reconstruction, around the ValuJet crash in 1996. The brand at this point was unsalvageable, and the business as well. There's very little trust left in Takata, and it has to dissolve and get absorbed for parts.

And since that bankruptcy in 2017, there have continued to be more and more issues with these airbags. In 2018 they confirmed the bankruptcy plan. In 2019, another recall for a separate class of Takata inflators — non-azide driver inflators, distinct from the main PSAN recall. In 2023, Honda issues a do-not-drive warning for several of their 2001 to 2003 Honda and Acura models. They determined the rupture rate on those units could be as high as 50%.

50% of airbag deployments could result in a really serious rupture. That is incredible.

Especially because they've aged so much at that point that the likelihood of a devastating event is significantly higher.

This is an interesting recall in that it's the aging of these products that makes them even more dangerous. Even though the fraction of airbags still out there is dwindling, the ones that remain are becoming more dangerous over time.

Just earlier this year, in February 2026, Stellantis issued a do-not-drive warning for about 225,000 additional vehicles — for models built as recently as 2016. So even though it's been 20 years since the first recall notice, vehicles are still being added to the Takata action.

So that covers the design and engineering story and the corporate story. But when we look at these failures, we often see a level of cultural failure that underlies them. This entire disaster has killed about 28 people in the US alone. And beyond the tragedy of those lives lost, this is also an automaker's worst nightmare. You have this extremely complex supply chain going into any modern car — thousands of parts. No automaker actually produces all the components that go into their cars. Modern automakers really depend on Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to build up the assemblies that then go into a fully assembled vehicle.

These automakers also don't have a huge number of suppliers to choose from for certain specialty components like this. That's what you find — these Takata airbags were installed in everything from Honda Civics to Ferraris and McLarens. Even a very high-end car can have this same problem.

Automakers really rely on the expertise of these suppliers. Designing and manufacturing airbags is very specialized. The big automotive OEMs have their own safety systems experts, of course, but really they're just specifying the performance they require from their suppliers and relying on them to do the underlying engineering that goes into meeting those requirements.

They saw that they could save a few dollars — which really adds up. And they saw that Takata had shipped so much product. They had 20% market share and were used by almost half of all automakers. You think it's a safe choice. But ultimately you buy cheap and it ends up being very expensive when you're paying for the recall.

In this case the failures are a really interesting combination of several organizational and managerial failure modes. In some cases, as we discussed, there is actual misrepresentation on Takata's part around their safety and manufacturing quality processes — airbags that have failed tests getting a new barcode and being shipped to an automaker.

You also see the incentives companies might have to lean on their IP portfolio, even if it's imperfect.

Honda was one of the most deeply impacted automakers by this recall. Takata and Honda have a relationship that goes back a long time. They were at one point kind of corporate siblings under a larger Japanese group of mutually co-owned companies, and they've had a long commercial relationship. Honda's executives were actually instrumental in encouraging Takata to expand into the airbag business. So there should have been a lot of mutual trust between these companies. But instead, managers tended to obfuscate and bury the issues.

That may have also pushed both sides to be willing to look the other way — to try to move the partnership forward and get parts out the door.

It's hard to really discipline a supplier when they're also a critical business partner.

I recently watched the documentary Ticking Time Bomb: The Truth Behind Takata Airbags. They talk about how since Takata had developed this novel inflator technology, they really wanted to leverage it as a differentiator — something they owned and didn't have to license. That can skew motivation toward a solution even if it's not necessarily the best or safest one. The protagonist in this documentary, John Keller, talks about working in a Takata lab and seeing a technician who had been injured after a test exploded and lacerated them — leaving a blood trail. He put together a report, but felt the information was suppressed and not addressed properly.

Is this something you'd characterize as a normal accident, like we talked about in our ValuJet reconstruction — something extremely hard to control? Or is this a different kind of cultural or managerial failure?

I think this is more an example of organizational failure, like we saw with the Challenger and the work Diane Vaughan did on that incident. People were aware of the risks, but because it hadn't been as devastating as it could be, they were willing to push forward and normalize what they were willing to accept.

This disaster unrolled across several different countries as well. Takata is a Japanese auto supplier, some of their plants are in the US, and the one at the center of this disaster was in Mexico. How was Takata organized, and was there an issue there?

You see at Takata the promotion of people who maybe didn't have the right expertise to properly evaluate the dangers. For example, there was a VP responsible for both the mechanical design and the inflator chemistry — and it would be challenging for any one person to be properly versed in both. It might be easier to dismiss the importance of one over the other. There's also the issue of Takata being a Japanese company, with executives for whom airbags were a newer product line. They didn't have a long history with this type of product or a deep understanding of what the ramifications could be if it went wrong. They had developed this novel technology and a huge deal lined up with Honda. The feeling was that accepting the reports about potential hazards would compromise their timeline and cost them that foothold in the market.

This is a characteristic you see in a lot of these failures — an organizational bias toward pushing forward, hitting the deadline, and not disappointing your superiors or your customers.

And assuming that what will go wrong will usually go right.

In this case, they very much disappointed their customers. Dozens of automakers. There's a reason that civil judgment — a billion dollars — had the bulk of it go to the automakers. They suffered most of the reputational and brand damage. They had to actually execute the recall. This was extremely costly for Takata's customers.

What's also fascinating about the Takata story is the other side of the recall — what happens to the recalled airbags. The documentary Ticking Time Bomb primarily focuses on this. John Keller, who had previously worked at Takata and been aware of the issues there, goes and visits some auto shops when the recalls are issued to find out how they're handling the removed airbags. He learns that they're taking them out, putting them in cardboard boxes, wrapping them onto a pallet, and shoving them onto a truck.

This has echoes of our ValuJet discussion from a few episodes ago.

Exactly. He finds that these airbags have been categorized as Class 9 miscellaneous — non-hazardous. But he knows these have ammonium nitrate and they should be classified as Class 1 explosives. He's extremely concerned about what could happen if one of these trucks got into an accident, because you'd have basically tons of explosive material in the back. So he buys about 5,000 airbags and goes through extensive testing to prove that the airbags should not be shipped as regular freight. He gets regulators to witness his tests so they can be certified, but he finds he's continuously rejected. It's remarkable to see that he went through all of this effort proving how dangerous the airbags are even after removal from the vehicle — and yet they continue to be shipped as Class 9 miscellaneous today.

It is remarkably easy to buy airbags as a consumer on the internet. This airbag in front of us came from eBay a few years ago, arriving by UPS ground. And related to that is a pretty significant problem with counterfeit airbags.

One thing referenced in the same documentary — there's a woman, Stephanie Erdman, who was injured by a Takata airbag, nearly blinded in one eye, with really severe lacerations. Those images were pervasive in the media when her accident happened. She said she went to get her car serviced and they were like, oh yeah, there's an airbag recall, but you don't really need to worry about that. She said, do you have internet on your computer? She has them Google her, they see those photos, and suddenly they understand. Even the people performing the recalls aren't always aware of the danger the parts pose.

The first reports of problems emerged between maybe 2004 and 2007, and gradually made their way to NHTSA. The first death from a Takata airbag came in 2009. But the major recalls were launched in 2013, so it took a while to work through the regulatory process and result in direct action. What was happening on the regulatory side?

Takata had received advice to establish better relationships in Washington — basically bringing on a lot of regulators and former regulators as paid consultants to improve their standing in that community. That smoothed the path for them to face a little less regulatory pressure. Something else that's well documented is the revolving door between government officials and industry. The saying is, people go into government to do good and leave government to do well. I think it was a former Takata executive that John Keller found himself presenting his case to at one point.

Despite the slowness of the recall process, it's actually been quite successful.

98% of recalled vehicles have been repaired as of early 2026 per NHTSA. That's an incredible rate — especially given that Wall Street Journal article citing a third of recalls are never completed. The problem is, the issue at hand is so dangerous that the remaining 2% still translates to over a million vehicles on the road today.

The volumes we're talking about here are remarkable. I'm always amazed in the automotive industry just how many units are involved in anything.

And the duration of time those units are on the road, subjected to all kinds of conditions that may not have been really understood at the time of development.

The two products that always strike me for their life cycles are cars and phones — at the opposite ends of the range. An iPhone costs $800 or something and you use it six hours a day for two years. Remarkable value. And the only thing comparable in daily life would be a car, much more expensive but lasting 20 years. You can park it under the hot sun in Arizona every single day and it basically works. I'm always struck too by how good old cars look now compared to 20 years ago. Back in the 90s, if you saw a 20-year-old car, it was a dumpy 20-year-old car — peeling paint, leather falling apart, things dragging under it. Now you see 20-year-old cars all the time and they look quite good. There's been a lot of progress in reliability and also in the durability of cosmetic finishes.

My first car moving back from college was a 90s Honda Civic I bought for $1,200 and sold four years later for $1,200.

Absolutely no depreciation.

It was incredible — half the price of my laptop, but I was riding around in it.

When I was in high school, a good friend of mine had a Dodge Colt from 1979 — about 20 years old at the time. You could see the road passing under you through the floor, corroded from below. That car actually had a badge on the back that said "Colt Imported for Dodge," because it was an early partnership between a US automaker and a Japanese one — in this case Mitsubishi. A rebadged Mitsubishi of some sort. You probably had to pay a junkyard to take that one. So a question this prompts — could this happen today the same way?

I think companies are still incentivized to attempt to pull this off, but what's different is the availability of information. Companies are more connected than ever and able to do a lot of their own inspection in ways that weren't possible before. With CT scanners, for example, airbags are something you would never want to take apart in your own lab. But you can CT scan it in the assembly and draw your own conclusions, especially if you're starting to have suspicions about a supplier.

The relationship between automotive OEMs and their suppliers has really evolved and become more sophisticated too. Technology has made it possible for customers to reach up into their supply chains and get more visibility. Software is often integrated between OEMs and suppliers so they can be more aware of quality as it moves through the factory floor. On the other hand, supply chains have continued to become more complex and more global. This introduces new challenges — airbag counterfeiting, for instance, is an enormous problem. The Wall Street Journal did an investigation and found that a really large fraction of airbags available through consumer marketplaces like eBay are outright counterfeits.

That's incredible to think that there is enough demand for that to even be worth making.

Cars last a really long time now, and after they're out of warranty you just go to whatever garage gives you the best quote. Especially if you've been in a crash and need your airbag unit replaced, a lot of people are looking for a low-cost solution. There are unauthorized third-party airbags — that's one thing. But then there are airbags that are outright counterfeits misrepresenting the real manufacturer. That kind of counterfeiting is visible in an X-ray CT scan but is not visible on visual inspection.

With the more global distribution of all these suppliers, with factories in multiple countries and distributors moving parts across borders, there might be even more opportunities for bad actors to enter the valid supply chain.

So what should car owners be doing to make sure they're not driving a bomb around?

People make fun of us online that our solution is always to pay more money for the parts you buy.

That's right.

Whether it's replacement automotive parts or batteries — if it seems like too good a deal to be true, we always find in the CT scans that it is, and it's going to have real hazards for you later. You buy cheap now and it's expensive later when you're dealing with the consequences.

Consumers don't have industrial CT scanners — we recognize that. But reputable manufacturers and distributors do. If you stick with them, you can hopefully trust that they've properly inspected what you're buying.

And always take your recall notices seriously. We all get those letters in the mail, they pile up, it can be troublesome to get to the dealer. But you really don't know when the circumstances might happen where the worst case plays out for you. Check your VIN, make sure there are no outstanding recalls, and take care of it.

If listeners would like to learn more, you can check out the show notes attached to this episode. In the video version you've been watching us with this airbag and seeing CT scans of its interior, and we'll provide links to explore those scans yourself. If you'd like to contact us, send us an email at gng@lumafield.com — we always love hearing from our listeners. Go/No-Go is brought to you by Lumafield, which makes a manufacturing intelligence platform that gives engineers and manufacturers complete confidence in the products that they ship. You can learn more at lumafield.com, and there you can also explore the CT scans of airbags. For Go/No-Go, I'm Jon Bruner.

And I'm Alex Hao.