Intro to Quality Management WK 3

Air Bag Recall
Assignment
Review the article Blow Out from this weeks reading assignment. This article pertains to the recall of air bag products. Assume you are the manager for a large automotive company that will be using air bags in your products. What risk assessment tools will you use in order to ensure that the product being installed into your vehicles meets safety standards in order to avoid a recall? Use your course materials and outside research to generate a solid analysis on why these methods would be helpful. Your analysis should be supported by research.
Directions for obtaining the file: Login to the Grantham University library by clicking on the Resources tab from the main page. You will then log into EBSCOHost. Once you have accessed the database simply copy and paste the title of the article and press enter to search and you should now have the file accessible to review.
The requirements below must be met for your paper to be accepted and graded:
Write between 750 1250 words (approximately 3 5 pages) using Microsoft Word in APA style see example below.
Use font size 12 and 1 margins.
Include cover page and reference page.
At least 80% of your paper must be original content/writing.
No more than 20% of your content/information may come from references.
Use at least three references from outside the course material one reference must be from EBSCOhost. Text book lectures and other materials in the course may be used but are not counted toward the three reference requirement.
Cite all reference material (data dates graphs quotes paraphrased words values etc.) in the paper and list on a reference page in APA style.
Article
Section:
Features
Business: Cars
Keywords: Safety; Automotive industry; Driving; Accidents; Brain; Congress; Design; Regulations; Vehicles; Weight; Fariello; Cars
Air bags are meant to save lives. Now a massive recall shows how they sometimes can turn deadly
Forensic Investigator Sal Fariello whose job is to deconstruct car crashes has witnessed a catalog of carnage caused by air bags over the past two decades. In his collection there is a photo of a woman who has been horribly scarred by an inflating air bag. There’s an X-ray of a driver’s broken wrists snapped in the fling zone of an air bag that mashed both arms from a 10-and-2 position into the car’s roof. He can cite numerous drivers who suffered torn aortas or lacerated brain stems all the result of being punched by an air bag inflating at 200 m.p.h. (322 km/h). What’s sitting in the front of the steering wheel is an explosive device explains Fariello the author of Airbag Injuries: Causation & Federal Regulation. Nasty unexpected events can occur.
None have been nastier than the injuries and deaths caused by exploding inflators in air bags made by automotive supplier Takata Corp. based in Tokyo. Its air bags have been blamed for killing five motorists in the U.S. so far. More than 10 million cars from 10 makersincluding BMW Chrysler Honda Nissan and Toyotahave been recalled. On Nov. 26 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) ordered Takata to expand its most recent recall from a regional one to a national one. Takata declined on the basis that the problem is confined to areas like Florida with high relative humidity. Toyota and Honda are following NHTSA’s advice and issued a national recall. All the cars are from model year 2011 or older.
Takata’s suspect inflation canisters contain a propellanttablets of ammonium nitratethat is ignited at the onset of a crash to initiate a chemical reaction that produces nitrogen gas to fill the bag. Moisture may be destabilizing the ammonium nitrate. In the faulty inflators the blast shatters the canister sending metal shards through the air bag toward the driver. Arriving at the scene of one such incident police thought the victim had been shot in the face before crashing. My understanding is our products in this accident worked abnormally said Hiroshi Shimizu who is in charge of Takata’s global quality assurance when prodded by Nevada Senator Dean Heller during Senate-committee testimony on Nov. 20.
On Dec. 2 Toyota called for a joint industry initiative to independently test the Takata bags. The safety security and peace of mind for our customers are our highest priority and I believe this is shared with all the other automakers said Simon Nagata CEO of Toyota’s North American manufacturing unit.
Perhaps these scenesaccident reports detailing both gore and tragedy congressional hearings well stocked with outrage and executives who struggle for the right tone of responseshould come as no surprise. It has after all been a very bad year for the auto industry. General Motors’ recall of 2.6 million vehicles earlier in 2014 stemmed in part from defects that led to air bags’ not deploying at all causing injury and death.
But the Takata crisis once again reminds us that this foundational piece of auto safety equipment has always carried the risk of injuryand deathriding shotgun. People have been hurt because they are the wrong size shape or age to get the optimal benefit from a device first designed for an average male. And now in Takata’s case because of a defect.
How Did We Get Here?
An air bag in deployment has to first measureand then counterthe considerable inertial forces that are brought to bear when your car crashes into another vehicle or object. In a collision your car stops abruptly but you don’t. Your head and body keep moving forward translating that energy according to Newtonian physics until some other force arrests it. Before the advent of air bags and seat belts this velocity debt was repaidat terrible costwhen your head or body smashed into the steering column or dashboard.
To stop your head’s violent forward motion requires considerable counterviolence. After a car’s accelerometers and sensors detect a crash pulsethe rapid deceleration that signals impactan algorithm in the electronic control unit (ECU) then decides whether to deploy the air bag and at what pressure. If the ECU says deploy the explosion that rapidly expands an air bag also hurtles it toward your head at speeds ranging from 98 m.p.h. to 200 m.p.h. (158 km/h to 322 km/h). In fact the bag should be deflating by the time your head makes contact creating a cushioning force that dissipates the energy of the crash by distributing it over the larger surface area of the bag. The entire process of sensing and deploying the air bag has to take place in 20 to 30 milliseconds by which time your head has already moved forward five inches.
Air bags have been saving lives since 1973 when General Motors produced 1000 Chevrolet Impalas equipped with air bags as an option. According to Byron Bloch an auto-safety expert who has long campaigned for better air bags Chevy produced a good one: a dual-pressure system that protected children from a fully powered air bag’s potentially lethal force. GM was satisfied with the technologythe concept was patented in 1953and Bloch said the company was ready to expand the program. We were going to have dual-pressure air bags phased in the ’74’75 model year he says.
Instead air bags disappeared for nearly 20 years. Why? The Big Three auto companies led by Ford boss Henry Ford II and his deputy Lee Iacocca convinced President Richard Nixon that air bags wouldn’t be cost-effective. The pressure on the Big Three to offer air bags ultimately came from smaller competitors like Volvo that made air bags standard equipment. With consumers clamoring for protection Congress made air bags mandatory as of September 1998.
The design and testing standards of these late-1990s air bags however would not make them better than the ones GM used in the early 1970s. When two elderly women were killed by air bags in the early ’90s it was a lethal indication that there were flaws. The elderly die very easily in car crashes says Fariello who has been a paid expert witness for both plaintiffs and defendants in injury lawsuits. The force of the deployed air bag even in low-speed fender benders was causing fatal chest and brain injuries. Short women were being injured because they moved their seats forward to reach the gas and brake pedals. As a result their faces were within 10 in. of the steering wheel which experts say is the minimum safety margin.
Auto-industry safety organizations consumer groups the Society of Automotive Engineers NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have debated test conditions for decades. NHTSA’s frontal tests are run at 35 m.p.h. (56 km/h) into a rigid barrier using a crash-test dummy optimized for a 50th-percentile maleabout 172 lb. and 5 ft. 9 in. (78 kg and 175 cm). Yet most crashes happen at speeds below 35 m.p.h. and they involve all kinds of people objects and crash angles. Hitting a pole is different from hitting a wall or another vehicle.
The test method meant that passengers who weren’t perfectly average were out of position in the vernacular of crash analysis. If you are not a 50th-percentile male something else happens says Fariello. Something very bad it turned out happens to women and children. According to NHTSA’s data air bags killed 191 children from 1990 to 2009 as well as 39 women who were 5 ft. 2 in. (157 cm) or shorter.
In the real world crashes occur in all different directions but we still need some standard test procedures to design around. The question is What proportion of real-world crashes have you covered? says Priya Prasad a safety consultant and expert in injury biomechanics who was formerly Ford’s top safety scientist. It would take several years of debate before NHTSA added a fifth-percentile female crash dummy to the test.
There’s no question that air bags can and do save lives especially in combination with advanced seat belts. But frontal-air-bag performance hasn’t changed significantly in recent years says Professor Richard Kent. He is deputy director of the Center for Applied Biomechanics at the University of Virginia which does testing for the government and other institutions. The adoption of advanced air bags that depower in low-speed crashes mandatory since 2006 and moving kids out of the front seat and into backseat restraints marked the last big survivability improvements. As far as injury effectiveness there’s no reason to think it’s substantially different than what it was five years ago he says.
How Good Are Air Bags Anyway?
But the bottom line on air bags is that their contribution to an accident’s survivability has always been incremental. Seat belts are the first and most important line of defense. Studies show that if you wear a seat belt you have about a 45% greater chance of surviving a potentially lethal crash. Adding an air bag improves that figure to 50% with a margin for error in both cases. According to NHTSA frontal air bags saved 2213 lives in 2012 but seat belts saved 12174 lives more than five times as many. Keep in mind that 33561 highway deaths were recorded in 2012. If you crash at a high speed and aren’t wearing a seat belt having an air bag in the car is as useful as having a balloon.
Can air bags get better? In my opinion air-bag technology is mature. It has sort of done what it is supposed to do says Kent. There’s more promise in advances elsewhere. Electronic stability control for instance is reducing rollovers which are particularly lethal. More advanced seat belts and sensors offer even more possibilities. By sensing the weight and position of occupants and whether they are belted belts work with air bags first to pretension (that is tighten) the shoulder strap and then let it unspool to apply the minimum force needed to restrain passengers without injuring their ribs or thorax with the air bag arriving to cushion the head. That’s particularly important for the increasing number of older drivers who suffer a disproportionate number of chest injuries.
It might be possible says Prasad to move to a smarter three-stage air-bag system. More likely he says is that black-box data recorders now in every car combined with newer anticollision warning and braking systems will improve the margin of safety. You will be able to predict what type of crash. And once you start predicting you could fire an air bag before the crash. Ultimately self-driving cars may render the whole driver-safety issue moot. But that could take a decade or even two.
In the meantime there are still a lot of old cars out there. Fariello recommends that you follow the New York State transportation department’s advice and hold the wheel in the 9 and 3 o’clock position as opposed to the 10 and 2 that many people were taught. If you are short consider pedal extenders to keep your face at least 10 in. (25 cm) from the wheel. And as far as car sizes go in a collision big beats small. Newton’s laws won’t have it any other way.
Fariello Bloch and others are concerned that overweight people still face greater danger. Current testing hasn’t accounted for them. According to Humanetics a company that makes crash-test dummies obese people are 78% more likely to die in crashes than average-weight people. The company is developing a test dummy that is 273 lb. (124 kg) with a body mass index of 35.
There is no precaution that protects you if your air bag becomes a weapon as has happened in some of the Takata incidents. Bloch a longtime advocate for safer air bags believes carmakers should disclose the air-bag supplier for each model. Some inflate in a basketball shape while others are pillow shaped which is better. Some have tethers that limit the distance they can travel which is potentially less damaging.
Amid all this sobering news it’s worth noting that the death rate on U.S. roads is decliningit has fallen 23% since 2005 and should decrease again this yearand seat-belt usage is at a record high. We’re a lot saferand will be even more so when the defective air bags are fixed.
HOW AIR BAGS WORK
THEY DEPLOY ONLY IN CERTAIN CRASH CONDITIONS. DEFECTS CAN HARM THE VEHICLE’S OCCUPANTS
[This article consists of 3 illustrations. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]
IMPACT
Sensors in your car detect the pulse of impact as well as the position of occupants sending signals to the electronic control unit in the middle of the car. An algorithm decides whether to deploy the air bags and at what forcefull or partial power.
PROPELLANT
STEERING COLUMN
FOLDED AIR BAG
IGNITER
INFLATOR
DEPLOYMENT
Air-bag inflators are small metal containers that hold an igniter and a propellant. In a crash the ignited propellant triggers a chemical reaction that produces nitrogen gas which fills the bag rapidly.
NITROGEN GAS
WHAT GOES WRONG
Takata’s propellant ammonium nitrate tablets may be degrading over time particularly in humid climates. This could cause a violent reaction in a crash in which the force blasts apart the inflator causing injuries or death.
814 M.P.H.
Minimum crash speed (1323 km/h) that could cause an air bag to deploy
2213
Lives saved by air bags in the U.S. in 2012
AFTER A CRASH IT TAKES:
0.02 SECONDS
for an air bag to deploy
0.06 SECONDS
for the passenger to hit the air bag