![]() Her 2001 Honda Accord bumped another car in the school parking lot. In May 2009, days after she graduated from Carl Albert High School in Midwest City, the 18-year-old drove to pick up her younger brother from football practice. His airbags and seatbelts had made him wealthy and likely saved thousands of lives.Īshley Parham, an Oklahoma all-state cheerleader who dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher, wasn’t one of them. When he died at 74 in 2011, Forbes magazine listed Juichiro Takada as Japan’s 29th richest person, worth some $900 million. FORBES METAL GEAR SOLID V REVIEW DRIVERSTakata’s troubles, and how they arose, shed light on the complexity of a key car component that millions of drivers now take for granted. They’ll get scant attention compared to advanced styling, high-tech engines and other visible features, even though the sophistication of airbags rivals that of any other piece of automotive technology. When the North American International Auto Show opens in Detroit this week, the hundreds of cars on display will contain thousands of airbags: up to 10 of them in some vehicles, mounted in the steering wheel, dashboard, doors and other places. “Takata has been partnering in complete cooperation with our customers and will continue to do so with complete transparency,” Takata spokesman Hideyuki Matsumoto told Reuters. But the lasting impact on Takata remains unclear. It has gained 78.5 percent from its low on that day, as Takata’s earnings expectations and Japan’s broader stock market both improved. Takata’s share price has rebounded after dropping almost 15 percent the day of the big recall announcement on April 11. The company says it has now resolved the quality issues, and its major customers, including Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co, say they continue to use Takata airbags and stand behind the company. It also has conceded to Reuters that, in at least one case, it kept inadequate quality-control records, which meant that hundreds of thousands of cars had to be recalled to find what might have been only a small number of faulty airbags, a decade after they were made. safety regulators that it improperly stored chemicals and botched the manufacture of the explosive propellants used to inflate airbags. It’s a classic case study in how a lapse in quality-control rigor can prove extraordinarily costly to even a well-regarded, successful company. regulators - is one of a company that lost its grip on quality. safety officials and former Takata employees - as well as reviews of documents filed with U.S. The tale that emerges from interviews with industry officials, chemical engineers, former U.S. Juichiro’s son and heir, Shigehisa Takada, gave up family operating control of the company for the first time, ceding the president’s post to a Swiss executive. FORBES METAL GEAR SOLID V REVIEW SERIESAfter a series of accidents and at least two deaths allegedly caused by faulty airbags, last year Takata’s car-company clients ordered the largest airbag-related recall in history. ![]() Nearly three decades later, Juichiro Takada’s worries seem prescient. ![]() Airbags evolved from a pricey option to standard equipment on millions of cars, and Takata became one of the top three manufacturers worldwide. Within a few years his company was not only making airbags, it had branched out into making the high-explosive pyrotechnic devices that inflate them, employing technology that borrows from rocket engines and is worlds removed from woven cloth. Somehow, in a fateful gamble, Takada changed his mind and crossed that bridge. In his 2012 memoirs, Kobayashi, who was leading Honda’s new airbag program in the mid-1980s, wrote that he wanted Takata to make airbags from its sturdy textiles. “We cannot cross a bridge that is so dangerous,” Takada told Saburo Kobayashi at the party. One mistake could ruin the company he inherited from his father. The newest idea in car safety, cushions that inflated within thousandths of a second after an accident, was just too risky. at a factory in Sibiu, 280km (175 miles) northwest of Bucharest, in this Septemfile photo. A man arranges airbag cushions manufactured by Japanese car parts maker Takata Corp. ![]()
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