Takata Details Results of Airbag Inflator Failure Tests

Takata Corp., which acknowledged this week that 34 million of its airbag inflators in the U.S. should be replaced, reports 0.9% of the devices it retrieved in recent months from already recalled vehicles exploded when later triggered in its lab tests.

Takata has detailed results of its own tests of 30,800 inflators in four reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The analyses describe three passenger-side inflator types and three variants of a driver-side inflator.

Failure rates ranged from 2.2% for one passenger-side inflator design the company supplied to General Motors, Honda and Toyota to 0.07% for three variants of a driver-side inflator system sold to BMW, Chrysler, Ford, Honda and Mazda. A fourth variant experienced no ruptures.

Takata has said high humidity is a factor in the failures. It reports all but two inflators that exploded in its tests came from vehicles that spent most or all their service lives in high humidity climates.

But neither Takata nor any other investigation has yet pinpointed the root cause of the failures. To complicate matters, Takata's tests show the failure rate of a given inflator design varies for unknown reasons by the type of vehicle in which they were installed.

The company says it is aware of 84 ruptures that occurred in vehicles on the road, including 15 in models not yet recalled. Of the total, 63 malfunctions involved driver-side Takata inflators and 21 were the company's passenger-side devices. The inflators were between 8 and 11.5 years old.