The Air Bag Body Count Upticks – And Will Again
April 2, 2019
Sixteen actual Americans have been killed by Takata air bags so far. The latest victim in Buckeye, AZ. As opposed to the hypothetical Americans not actually killed by VW’s “cheating” on Uncle’s emissions certification tests.
More actuals are going to die, too – from the air bags. It’s inevitable; the odds are heavily stacked.
There are hundreds of thousands of cars in circulation with air bags Uncle knows are defective; knows have killed and so – great leap of logic – are probably going to kill again.
Yet Uncle does not hurl a fatwa granting permission for the people who were forced by Uncle to buy these air bags to even temporarily disable them until they can be replaced with new air bags that may also kill them, but which at least aren’t known to be defective.
Chew on it for a moment.
The government knows there are cars – a vast fleet of cars, encompassing several makes and many models built over a period of several years – that have an extremely dangerous safety defect, a literal ticking time bomb – and all that’s happened is a languid, take-a-number rolling recall that involved sending notices to the owners of these cars to make an appointment with their dealer to get the defect fixed.
Meanwhile, just keep on driving.
Which they’ve been doing – and will keep on doing – for some time to come, because of the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of cars saddled with these defective bags and dealerships can’t just fix them all at once or even six months from now.
This has been going on for many months – years, even – and will likely continue to time-delay kill stragglers, the owners of cars with defective bags who did not get a recall notice because of paperwork misdirection. Cars have been bought and sold; people have moved. It is no easy thing to find every registered owner of these cars and alert them to the Claymore – literally, the bags explode and spew shrapnel just like a land mine – that is perched just a few inches from their face.
VW was forced to park vast fleets of perfectly safe – and clean – diesel-powered cars (the entire 2016 model year run) on account of “cheating” on EPA emissions certification tests. These cars never hurt anyone – or even the environment – but Uncle went ballistic.
Because he’d been hurt.
His authority pricked. That is intolerable – which was made very clear to VW, which is so broken it now pays for advertising campaigns touting its rivals’ (electric) cars and has announced – loving Big Brother-style – that it will henceforth only do business with suppliers who are “socially responsible,” practice “sustainability” and all that jazz.
From Eric Peters Autos, here.