Toyota adds nearly 1.4M vehicles to Takata air bag recall
Source: AP-Excite
DETROIT (AP) — Toyota is adding nearly 1.4 million cars, trucks and SUVs to a growing recall for air bags that can explode with too much force.
The company says it's expanding a previous recall after Takata Corp. of Japan agreed to double the size of its air bag inflator recall to 33.8 million.
Vehicles added to a passenger air bag inflator recall include the 2003 to 2007 Corolla and Matrix, 2005 and 2006 Tundra pickup, 2005 to 2007 Sequoia SUV and the 2003 to 2007 Lexus SC430 convertible.
The propellant in some Takata inflators can burn too quickly, blowing apart a metal canister and sending shrapnel into the passenger compartment. Seven deaths and more than 100 injuries have been attributed to the problem.
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150616/us--toyota-air_bag_recall-7e760873d2.html
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An airbag has to fill with gas - they use nitrogen - EXTREMELY fast. If they tried putting a tank of compressed nitrogen into the steering column there would be three major problems: you'd have to take the car in to the shop on a regular basis to put more nitrogen in the tank because it'd leak out, if it leaked out while your windows were rolled up it would displace oxygen and kill everyone in the car, and there'd be no way you could get it into the airbag fast enough to make the airbag work. (The minor problem is "how the hell would you fit the tank into the steering column?"
There's a good solution: when you set off explosives, they produce shitloads of gas instantly - the force of an explosion is merely massive amounts of gas expanding at an unbelievably rapid rate. If you put a small amount of low explosive - yes, one of the agents in the mixture is ammonium nitrate, every miner's favorite explosive - and a blasting cap into the bag part of an airbag, setting it off will produce the desired effect with the added benefit that it'll sit there ready to go, without requiring maintenance, for decades if you don't run into anyone, and still work when you need it.
Hence the basic procedure: they mix up a secret recipe of various blasting agents chosen because they produce the desired result without costing a small fortune or producing lethal smoke, form it around a blasting cap into a little command-detonated mine, dip it in something like molten paraffin to humidity-proof it, put it into the bag that will inflate to keep you in your seat, fold up the bag so it'll unfold the way they want it to, put it in an enclosure for installation in the car, box it up and ship it out. Takata also makes interior parts like dashboards, seats and steering wheels; I'm not sure whether they ship the steering wheels to Moses Lake or the airbags to the steering wheel plant (which I DON'T know the location of, sorry - I only know where the airbag plant is because they advertise in my newspapers) but when they ship the steering wheels and door panels to the auto plant the airbags are already in them.
Fun fact: a nail polish factory is also an explosives plant.
