[Automotive News] How Takata crossed 'dangerous bridge' on airbag quality
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2014 6:21 pm
http://www.autonews.com/article/2014011 ... z2qbpszldJ
DETROIT/TOKYO (Reuters) -- At a New Year's party thrown by Honda in 1985, Juichiro Takada, heir to a family woven-cloth business that had branched into car seatbelts, divulged a decision. His company, Takata Corp., would steer clear of mass-producing automotive airbags.
The newest idea in car safety, cushions that inflated within thousandths of a second after an accident, was just too risky. One mistake could ruin the company he inherited from his father.
"We cannot cross a bridge that is so dangerous," Takada told Saburo Kobayashi at the party. 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. Somehow, in a fateful gamble, Takada changed his mind and crossed that bridge.
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. The bet paid off spectacularly. Airbags evolved from a pricey option to standard equipment on millions of cars, and Takata became one of the top three manufacturers worldwide.
Nearly three decades later, Juichiro Takada's worries seem prescient. After 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. Takata took a charge of $307 million.
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.
The tale that emerges from interviews with industry officials, chemical engineers, former U.S. safety officials and former Takata employees -- as well as reviews of documents filed with U.S. regulators -- is one of a company that lost its grip on quality. 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.
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