The nightmare of the people comes to the fore once again Takata airbags: this time Citroën is asking for the immediate withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of units, raising the alarm among owners of C3 and DS3 produced between 2009 and 2019, asking them to immediately stop using the cars due to the serious dangers connected precisely to the safety systems produced by the Japanese company.
The recall and the inconveniences
The French car manufacturer sent a communication to approximately 600 thousand motorists who are in possession of the most at-risk cars, i.e. the C3 and DS3 models produced between 2009 and 2019: the warning concerns around twenty countries in Southern Europe, including Italy, but also the North Africa and the Middle East.
Unlike other similar circumstances, in which the motorist was advised to take the car in for repairs, in this case the recall request launched by Citroën is peremptory: without mincing words, in fact, we are talking about the vehicle not being used. The owner of the car to which the alert is addressed must therefore keep the car still: the dangers associated with the use of the airbag could cause serious injuries or even lead to death.
Given the urgency of the notice, therefore, anyone who decides to continue using their car would do so at their own risk, and there is no guarantee that the insurance will be liable for any damage in such situations. The problem, however, is not easy to solve, given that the owners of 497,171 Citroën C3s and those of 108,601 DS3s are being asked to block the vehicle from one day to the next. Without considering the fact that replacing the airbags of such a large number of cars can lead to enormous difficulties in finding spare parts for everyone as well as endless waits between booking lists and technical intervention times on each vehicle. Find a’replacement car to overcome the problem, consumer and motorists’ associations report, is not always simple and in any case has decidedly heavy costs.
The risks and the origin of the danger
The problem is linked once again to the airbags produced by the Japanese company Takata, which went bankrupt in 2017 precisely because of the enormous compensation it had to pay to the numerous car manufacturers damaged by the problems with the safety devices.
To understand the origin of the danger it is necessary to refer to the gases used in the creation of the safety devices. In the beginning, sodium azide was used sodium azidewhich was however very expensive, had a low expansion coefficient, which forced the creation of airbags of significant dimensions and therefore cumbersome, and produced harmful secondary gases.
This gas was replaced by ammonium nitrate at the end of the 90s, which seemed to have solved the problem of size and harmfulness, and this is precisely the system used by Takata. Nonetheless, there were other risks. In certain hot and humid climatic conditions, small cracks form in the originally compact gas. Due to the “degradation” of the gas, the airbag is triggered more quickly and violently in the event of an accident, and it is precisely this that causes the greatest risks for the driver, who is hit by debris and pieces of metal projected inside the vehicle by the bursting of the balloon. Nowadays we have moved on to using the safest guanidine nitratebut over the years Takata has continued to prefer the cheaper and more dangerous ammonium nitrate to the more stable although expensive tetrazole.
This has led to numerous recalls around the world by major car manufacturers. In 2008, the first cases of malfunctions occurred in the United States: it was Honda that recalled 4,000 vehicles.
The following year there were two deaths due to airbags, while in 2010 Honda had to recall hundreds of thousands of vehicles: it was then that the NHTSA, the American body responsible for road safety, began the first checks which in 2013 laid the foundations for the investigation against Takata, which even went so far as to tamper with or destroy test data on safety devices. To date, in the USA alone, Takatagate has affected approximately 57 million cars; there are around fifty dead and over 400 seriously injured. Globally, the estimate is as many as 100 million cars.
