As if tens of millions of dangerous Takata airbags weren’t bad enough, there’s a new threat lurking behind some drivers’ dashboards. Their airbags may not say Takata, but they may be dangerous all the same. That’s because counterfeit airbags are a growing problem according to The Wall Street Journal, with multiple fatalities, arrests, and an unknowable number of hazardous fakes out on the roads.
In the past year, at least five Americans have reportedly been killed or seriously injured by fake car airbags. WSJ‘s feature found that the problem dates back at least as far as the Takata recall, when numerous vehicles were found to have knockoff airbag inflators. Some apparently even had empty “shells” where airbags should have been. It seems that forgeries can have the same markings as real, OEM-approved parts, making them hard to identify. Tracking them is even harder, owing to the decentralized, small-scale supply chain of the fake parts.
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