Researchers identify cause of Takata Corp airbag failure

More than a year after defective Takata airbags led to recalls and at least two fatalities, researchers have uncovered the cause of rupture of car airbags supplied by Takata Corporation.

Takata officials in Japan had presented falsified test data about a new component's design to Honda, their largest customer, according to internal documents.

The fudged data, discussed in an internal 2010 document and cited in a report published on Tuesday by the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation, illustrates what investigators said was a pattern of deceit at Takata that continued long after the severity of the airbag defect came to light.

The researchers hired by a coalition of automakers found that moisture - seeping from the environment into the inflator and not dried by a chemical - was the reason for the rupture of the airbags that also sprayed shards of metal and plastic at motorists.
 
With the findings from Orbital ATK, a Dulles, Virginia-based company, a maker of rocket-propulsion systems, government regulators would be able to determine how many vehicles equipped with Takata air bags needed to be recalled.

As the root cause of Takata's inflator ruptures had not been determined automakers and the supplier had not been able to decide how recall costs should be shared.
 
All three of the conditions outlined in the statement - poor design, lack of water-absorbing chemicals and high atmospheric temperatures with wide ranges - had to be present for the airbag inflators to be at risk of rupture, according to David Kelly, a former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Automaker Group, the Independent Testing Coalition, had hired Kelly to run the tests last year.

''We are confident this is the root cause for these vehicles,'' he was quoted as saying in an interview.

The new design was experimental and never produced, but according to Takata engineers in North America, they felt pressured by their counterparts in Japan to proceed with it despite what they viewed as its "high likelihood of failure."