takata

A company that made car airbags. Pretty much every car company except for Volvo used Takata airbags on at least one vehicle line at some point in time, but Honda and Toyota used their airbags the most. Back in the 1990s, airbags were made with a chemical propellant called sodium azide, which is very toxic. By 2000 automakers switched to other propellants that were safer. Takata switched to a propellant called Tetrazole for a while, it was effective but expensive. Takata was looking to save a buck and decided to go with ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate tends to stick together after absorbing humidity. This problem is worse in climates which have lots of hot and humid weather. The airbags are sealed in a metal container, so it takes several years for the propellant to clump together. For the first few years after Takata made the switch to ammonium nitrate, everything was going well. Then, starting around 2008, some of these airbags went off in crashes and instead of providing a cushion, they shot fucking shrapnel at people in crashes. The ammonium nitrate's clumping together caused it to detonate too forcefully, blowing apart the housing of the airbag. Over 20 people have been killed by these airbombs, the vast majority of them in Hondas and Ford Rangers from the early to mid 2000's. Despite a massive recall campaign which succeeded in getting the vast majority of these airbombs out of cars, the damage had been done and Takata closed down in 2018.