Comment on US moves to force recall of 52 million air bag inflators that can explode and hurl shrapnel
Mandarbmax@lemmy.world 1 year agoI mean, air bag inflator are pretty much just explosive devices to begin with, just ones that are calibrated to only make enough of an explosion to fill up an air bag and no more. I can’t think of a more obvious failure mode than exploding too much except for not exploding enough.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The issue isn’t exploding too much, it’s that on a very small sample of them, some of the welding could block the exhaust port that goes to fill the airbag up.
So without that exhaust, the thing just explodes like a small bomb rather than filling the airbag.
The actual number is ridiculously tiny though. They only have less than 10 possible cases across hundreds of millions of airbags over 14 years across the US and Canada.