Takata, from the complaint side

The largest recall in automotive history is usually described in units. Here it is in what owners actually filed: 29 nameplates, 14 makes, one decade.

The Takata airbag recall is normally quoted as a number of inflators — roughly 67 million in the United States, more than 100 million worldwide, across around nineteen manufacturers. It is the largest recall in automotive history and the figure is so large it stops meaning anything.

Here is a smaller and stranger view of it: what showed up in the complaints people filed about their own cars.

What made it different

Almost every fault on this site belongs to a car. Coolant intrusion is a Ford EcoBoost problem. Windscreen cracking is a Subaru problem. Compliance bushings are a Honda Pilot problem. You can name the manufacturer from the fault.

Takata cannot be traced that way, because Takata was not a manufacturer of cars. It was a supplier, and the affected list reads like a directory of the industry:

Toyota, Honda, Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Lincoln, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Dodge, Nissan, Subaru.

Fourteen makes who competed with each other on safety, all shipping the same part, all recalling it.

The decade

Fifty-five model years in all. The centre of mass is 2007 to 2012, which is the period when the affected inflators were being fitted at scale. The tail-off at each end is the part entering and leaving production, not the problem being solved — the recall itself ran for a decade afterwards.

Some nameplates carry it across four consecutive model years: the Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX from 2007 to 2010, the Chevrolet Silverado from 2007 to 2011, the Volkswagen Eos from 2010 to 2014.

Why the propellant mattered

Takata’s inflators used ammonium nitrate to generate the gas that fills the bag. It is cheap and it is energetic, and it is also unstable: it degrades when it cycles through heat and humidity, year after year, in a car parked outside.

A degraded inflator can burn too fast when it fires. The metal housing ruptures, and the device intended to cushion a driver’s face sprays it with fragments instead. More than twenty-five deaths in the United States and hundreds of injuries, from equipment fitted specifically to prevent exactly that.

Takata pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2017 for falsifying test data, paid a billion dollars, and went bankrupt. The assets became Joyson Safety Systems.

The thing worth taking from it

Every other finding on this site tells you something about a car. This one tells you something about a supply chain.

Fourteen brands, competing hard, differentiating on safety, marketing their engineering against each other — and underneath, one shared component with one shared flaw. The badge on the bonnet said nothing about whether you had it.

When someone tells you a particular manufacturer builds safer cars, this is the qualification worth remembering. Much of what is under the badge came from somewhere else, and was bought by everybody.

What we are measuring

Owners writing “Takata” by name in a complaint, which is not the same as the recall’s actual footprint. The real recall covered far more vehicles than appear here; these are the cars where the recall was prominent enough in owners’ minds to dominate what they filed.

That makes this an account of attention, not of exposure. If your car is not on this list, that is not evidence its inflator was fine — it is evidence its owners were writing about something else.

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