WCA July 2016

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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2016
From the Americas
The airbag recalls
A 17-year-old girl is the tenth USA victim
of faulty Takata airbag inflators. How
great is the danger to the driving public?
Attributed to shrapnel from an exploding airbag, the
31st March death in Texas of the teenaged driver of a 2002
Honda Civic has refocused attention on airbag inflators
made by Japanese auto parts maker Takata Corp, now
the subject of several industry investigations. At least 11
people – ten in the USA and one in Thailand – have died in
incidents linked to Takata inflators: metal cartridges loaded
with propellant wafers which in some cases have ignited
with explosive force. More than 50 million autos equipped
with the devices have been recalled worldwide.
In the USA, Takata inflators have figured in 28.8 million
recalls, mainly of cars from model years 2002 to 2015. In
what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) said is the “largest and most complex safety recall
in [the nation’s] history,” vehicles made by 14 different
automakers have been recalled for replacement of frontal
airbags on the driver’s side or passenger’s side, or both.
In the first public government accounting of Takata airbag
inflators in unrecalled vehicles on USA roads, the auto
safety regulators on 13th April put the number of such
devices at some 85 million. Under an agreement concluded
last year, Takata has until 2019 to prove the soundness of
the inflators.
Meanwhile, together with Toyota Motor Corp and other
automakers, Honda Motor Co (which so far has recalled the
greatest number of vehicles over the airbag issue) has said
it will not install Takata inflators in new models.
As observed drily by Andrew Krok in Roadshow (15th April),
any additional recalls “would likely leave a strong financial
impression [on Takata].” The company has posited a
worst-case scenario in which the recalls cost it about $24
billion, well in excess of revenues from its last fiscal year.
If a recall of those 85 million inflators should be launched,
wrote Mr Krok, “That’s about as worst-case as it gets.”
Worse still, of course, would be further deaths and injuries:
“a potentially disastrous outcome from a supposedly
life-saving device,” as noted by Consumer Reports (“Takata
Airbag Recall - Everything You Need to Know,” 14th April)
‘Putting the dangers in perspective’
Consumer Reports (Yonkers, New York) was established in
1936 to provide unbiased product testing and ratings. In its
Takata coverage the independent, non-profit organisation
pointed out that establishing the root cause of the incidents
and determining which of the company’s several inflator
designs is involved have posed difficulties for investigators.
It now appears that there are multiple possible causes and
contributing factors.
It has been established that if high humidity or something
else causes the wafers inside the inflator to break down, the
propellant burns too rapidly, creating excessive pressure
within the device. Several years of driving in regions of the
USA that experience high heat and humidity could, it is now
believed, produce that breakdown effect. Even the design
of the car could contribute to it. Poor quality control in
manufacture of the inflator could, of course, be implicated.
Equally might it not be.
 In a passage headed “Putting the Dangers in
Perspective,” Consumer Reports observed that, “as
awful as they are,” ruptured-inflator incidents are very
rare. In June of 2015, Takata stated that it was aware of
88 ruptures (67 driver-side and 21 passenger-side) out
of over 1.2 million airbag deployments spread over 15
years.
Thus the conclusion drawn by Consumer Reports
that airbags in general are not dangerous. As it noted,
“The [US] Department of Transportation estimates that,
between 1987 and 2012, frontal airbags have saved
37,000 lives.”
Aluminium
A United Steelworkers trade case in the
USA draws “a line in the sand” against
aluminium imports, mainly from China
China, which already accounts for more than half the
world’s aluminium production, is expanding capacity even
as its economy decelerates. The result has been a surge in
aluminium exports and falling prices for other producers.
Claiming that the Chinese export surge has seriously
injured the American industry and threatens additional
job and capacity losses, the United Steelworkers (USW)
on 18th April filed a petition with the USA International
Trade Commission (ITC) that seeks to stem the flow of
primary unwrought aluminium imports. (Primary unwrought
aluminium typically undergoes further processing by the
original producer or other manufacturer.) The petition
invokes Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act, last resorted to
by President George W Bush in 2001 in a successful push
for American tariffs on steel imports.
While China is clearly the major focus of the USW, any
action taken by the ITC would affect imports from other
countries, as well. Most of the aluminium currently flooding
the American market comes from Canada, the Middle
East, Russia and Venezuela, and the union’s Section 201
case addresses imports from around the world. It requests
four years of increased tariffs, capped at a price “allowing
domestic producers to effectively operate and, hopefully,
restore production.”
The petition also calls for USA negotiations with trading
partners, mainly China, centred on the scaling-back of
over-production. Declaring that world markets are being
destroyed by China’s policies and practices, Tom Conway,
USW international vice president, said at the union’s
Pittsburgh headquarters, “This vital case draws a line in
the sand. We will not cede primary unwrought aluminium
production.”
BigStockPhoto.com Photographer: Aispl