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NHTSA Seeks to Recall 52 Million Airbag Inflaters by ARC and Delphi

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The action covers airbags made by two companies and used by 12 automakers from 2000 to 2018. The parts were linked to seven injuries and one death.Federal auto safety regulators moved Tuesday toward a recall of about 52 million airbag inflaters used by a dozen major carmakers, calling the parts unsafe and susceptible to rupture.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration scheduled a public meeting on Oct. 5 on its recommendation to recall the airbags, manufactured by ARC Automotive and Delphi Automotive Systems. ARC rejected the agency’s initial findings that its airbags were defective.The agency said that at least seven people had been injured and one killed in seven incidents in the United States as a result of the defective airbags.Of the 52 million airbags, 41 million were manufactured by ARC and 11 million were produced by Delphi using a design licensed by ARC. The airbags were variously made in China, Mexico and Knoxville, Tenn., and were used by a dozen major carmakers: BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Kia, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Stellantis, Tesla, Toyota and Volkswagen.“An airbag inflater that fails by rupture not only does not perform its job as a safety device, but instead actively threatens injury or death, even in a crash where the vehicle occupants would otherwise have been unharmed,” the agency said in its announcement.ARC and Delphi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The ARC matter comes several years after the safety agency’s investigation of inflaters made by Takata, a Japanese supplier, that were found to explode violently and suddenly, even when the airbags were not deployed in a crash. In that case, regulators determined that Takata used a propellant that could break down over time from exposure to humidity.The safety agency linked the Takata defect to more than a dozen deaths in the United States. More than 70 million vehicles equipped with Takata inflaters were recalled in more than 40 countries.In April, the safety agency demanded in a letter to ARC that the company recall tens of millions of airbag inflaters that were made from 2000 to 2018.The agency’s investigators found that a small number of inflaters designed by ARC could explode more violently than intended when a vehicle’s airbags are deployed, and therefore “pose an unreasonable risk of death or injury,” the letter said.The letter prompted G.M. to recall nearly one million vehicles made from 2014 to 2017 and equipped with ARC inflaters. The automaker said it was taking the action “out of an abundance of caution.”In response to the agency’s demand, ARC declined to issue a recall and said in a letter in May that it did not believe a defect existed and that in its view NHTSA’s finding was not based on “any objective technical or engineering conclusion.”Inflaters use an explosive substance such as ammonium nitrate that is compacted into tablets stored in a metal cylinder. In a crash severe enough to set off a vehicle’s airbags, the tablets are supposed to create a controlled explosion that rapidly fills the airbags with gas.The safety agency said it had found that ARC’s manufacturing process could leave bits of welding material, known as weld slag, inside the cylinder. If the airbags are deployed, that material could clog the exit opening and cause an explosion violent enough to blast shards of metal and plastic into the vehicle’s interior.The agency has been looking at ARC inflaters since 2015. The most recent incident involving a rupture occurred in Michigan in March, when the driver of a 2017 Chevrolet Traverse sustained facial injuries.ARC, in its letter to regulators in May, said that weld slag had been ruled out as the cause of two of the seven incidents noted by the agency, and that it had not yet been found definitively to be the cause of the other five.A large-scale recall, and any related legal expenses, could have considerable costs for the inflater makers. After the Takata recall, the largest in automotive history, which forced it to pay millions of dollars in fines to U.S. regulators, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and was sold to Joyson Safety Systems, formerly known as Key Safety Systems.Takata had been responsible for the cost of replacing the defective inflaters — a task handled by local car dealerships — but the bankruptcy filing left automakers to pick up the bill. About 11 percent of the affected airbags still haven’t been replaced, according to the safety agency’s most recent estimate.The agency has come under scrutiny for its investigations of vehicle defects. In May the Department of Transportation’s inspector general issued a report concluding that the agency’s Office of Defects Investigations did not identify and investigate safety defects in a timely manner. More

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    Italy’s Government Takes Aim at Taxi Shortages

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    The government took steps this week to increase the supply of cabs after months of shortages, but critics say the problems with the industry run deeper.This summer, countless tourists, as well as residents of many top Italian destinations, found themselves in the fruitless pursuit of elusive game: a taxi.In Italy, where ride-sharing services like Uber, Lyft and Bolt have been met with strong resistance and are heavily restricted, social media sites channeled tirades describing hourslong taxi lines at train stations and airports. Callers to taxi dispatch numbers were put on hold for interminable waits. And regular taxi apps failed to find cars.Returning to Rome from Naples one Monday afternoon in June, a train trip that takes just over an hour, Daniele Renzoni said that he and his wife waited for more than an hour and a half at Termini station for a cab under a blazing sun.“Just image a long line of grumbling, frustrated people, complaining, cursing. Hot day, angry tourists, there’s not much else to say,” said Mr. Renzoni, who is retired. “Taxi drivers will tell you there’s too much traffic, too many requests, too much everything, but the fact is, the customer pays.”The situation is “a disgrace to Italy,” said Furio Truzzi, president of the consumer rights group Assoutenti, one of several associations that protested the shortage.Things got so bad that earlier this week the government intervened, introducing measures that would simplify procedures so that cities can issue new taxi licenses, including temporary ones to cover peak periods like the summer or major events like the Catholic Church’s Jubilee in 2025 and the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo in 2026.Major cities and those with international airports, like Rome, Milan and Naples, where the taxi crunch has been felt most keenly, will also be able to increase the number of licenses by 20 percent, though owners of the new permits must use electric or hybrid cars.In Rome, for example, there are now about 7,800 taxis, and if 20 percent more licenses were issued, there would be about 1,500 more. Parliament now has two months to convert the decree into law.But transportation experts said the decree falls far short of what they say is a needed overhaul of the industry, which holds outsized sway over local — and national — politics. Thanks to the taxi lobby, ride-sharing services are almost nonexistent in Italy, where Uber is the only platform in use, with many restrictions.The government lost an opportunity for real change, said Andrea Giuricin, a transportation economist at a research center at the University of Milan Bicocca. He said the best way to meet consumer needs would be to increase the number of licenses for Italy’s chauffeur services, known as N.C.C., which work with Uber.“It’s very difficult in Italy” because “there isn’t a culture of liberalization in general,” creating little opportunity for competition, said Professor Giuricin. Taxis “are a small but powerful lobby” that easily influences politics, “which is very weak” in Italy, he said.Taxis parked in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples during a strike last year. Taxi drivers are a powerful lobby, and ride-sharing services have only made timid inroads in Italy.Ciro Fusco/EPA, via ShutterstockAngela Stefania Bergantino, a professor of transportation economics at the University of Bari, pointed out that previous governments had tried to open up the taxi market. But they failed.“The problem is that taxis are regulated by municipal governments, which can find themselves captive in the sense that it is difficult for City Hall to implement policies that the cab lobby doesn’t like,” she said. “These are lobbies that have effective strike tools,” like wildcat strikes or traffic blockages that can paralyze entire cities, she said.Industry officials were dismissive of the new decree. “Much ado about nothing,” said Andrea Laguardia, director of Legacoop Produzione e Servizi, an association of taxi cooperatives. “The government presented these measures as crucial to resolving the taxi shortage,” he said, but city governments, which issue taxi licenses, could already issue more if warranted. The measures don’t “resolve the problem of urban mobility,” Mr. Laguardia said.According to a 2022 report by Italy’s transportation authority, Italy has roughly one taxi for every 2,000 people, fewer than other European countries like France or Spain.Italy’s competition watchdog said this month that it was also examining the industry.Representatives of drivers for chauffeur services, who have much to gain from any liberalization of the market, say they are being held hostage by the taxi lobby, even as the world becomes digital and a rebound in tourism increases demand.“We are losing out on rides because we can’t increase the number of cars on the road,” said Luigi Pacilli, the president of Federnoleggio, a group representing some N.C.C. drivers.“It’s a complete bluff,” he said of the new measures, which allow, but do not mandate, new licenses. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could shake things up, he said, “but I don’t know if she’ll have the will or desire to fight one of the strongest lobbies in Europe.”Taxi drivers say they are taking the hit for a plethora of problems: traffic in cities that slows cars to a snail’s pace, the surge in tourism after the pandemic’s peak and inefficient public transportation.“Let’s make local public transportation work well and then we can decide if more licenses are necessary,” said Loreno Bittarelli, the president of one of Italy’s largest taxi dispatch consortiums.The drivers say that critical shortages last only last a few months each year, and that demand slows to a standstill in winter. Adding new licenses would only stretch the winter fasting among more drivers.Above all, though licenses are issued by the city, they can then be sold by the drivers, for sums that can reach 250,000 euros, or about $276,000, depending on the city — a retirement nest egg for many. With an influx of new licenses, the value of an existing license would depreciate.City administrators fear cabbies could revolt and strike if the status quo changes. “If I decide to issue new licenses,” said Eugenio Patanè, Rome’s city councilor in charge of transportation, “I’m going to find 1,000 taxis blocking traffic in Piazza Venezia,” the downtown Rome square that taxi drivers habitually clog while protesting. More

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    Michael Pertschuk, Antismoking and Auto Safety Crusader, Dies at 89

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    As an obscure but muscular congressional staffer and chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, he helped usher into law a raft of consumer protections.Few people outside Washington had ever heard of the consumer advocate Michael Pertschuk by the mid-1970s, but he was considered so influential in Congress that friends and foes alike anointed him “the 101st senator,” and the cigarette maker Philip Morris proclaimed him the company’s “number one enemy.”While he never held elective public office, Mr. Pertschuk occupied, as The Washington Post wrote in 1977, “the top stratum of an invisible network of staff power and influence in the Senate, with impact on the life of every citizen of the United States.”Probably more than any other individual, he was responsible for the government’s placing warning labels on cigarettes, banning tobacco advertising from television and radio, requiring seatbelts in cars and putting in place other consumer protections — all by helping to draft those measures into law as the chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Commerce Committee and later as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Jimmy Carter.“I spent a good part of my life making life miserable for the tobacco companies,” Mr. Pertschuk had said, “and I’m not sorry about that.”He died on Nov. 16 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. His wife, Anna Sofaer, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Mr. Pertschuk, second from right in the foreground, and other appointees take the oath of office in a White House ceremony in April 1977. He was named F.T.C. chairman. His wife, Anna Sofaer, is at right. Justice William J. Brennan of the Supreme Court administered the oath, with President Jimmy Carter flanking him. Associated PressFor ordinary consumers who were vexed by the government’s lax oversight of the tobacco and auto industries beginning in the mid-1960s, Mr. Pertschuk was their unseen legal guardian.He helped draft the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the Recreational Boat Safety Act, the Federal Railroad Safety Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Toxic Substances Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Decades later, he lifted the veil on government sausage-making in his book “When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies” (2017).“Few have done more to reduce tobacco use in the United States and to galvanize and empower the tobacco control movement than Mike Pertschuk,” Matthew L. Myers, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement.He added, “He arguably became the most aggressive Federal Trade Commission chair in history and pursued powerful preventive health measures, including a proposed ban on advertising targeted at children.”The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, with whom Mr. Pertschuk collaborated closely on auto safety and other issues, described him as “a brilliant strategist, organizer and human relations genius while he was reshaping the Commerce Committee into the ‘Grand Central Station’ of consumer protection.”“He also ignited the anti-tobacco industry movement on Capitol Hill and later traveled the world motivating other countries to do the same,” Mr. Nader said in a statement.Mr. Pertschuck in 1984. He remained an F.T.C. commissioner after Ronald Reagan became president. Stepping down, he said the administration’s “ideological blindness led to a new era of regulatory nihilism and just plain nuttiness.” George Tames/The New York TimesMichael Pertschuk was born on Jan. 12, 1933, in London to a Jewish family who had sold furs in Europe for generations but who fled in 1937 as Nazi Germany codified anti-Semitism and girded for war. His father, David, opened a fur store in Manhattan. His mother, Sarah (Baumgarten) Pertschuk, was a homemaker.He graduated from Woodmere Academy on Long Island, where he grew up, earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale in 1954, served in an Army artillery unit from 1954 to 1956 and was discharged as a first lieutenant. He received his law degree from Yale Law School in 1959.After clerking for Chief Judge Gus J. Solomon of the U.S. District Court in Oregon, he was hired in Washington in 1964 as a legislative assistant to Senator Maurine B. Neuberger, an Oregon Democrat. About the same time, the United States surgeon general released his groundbreaking report linking smoking to cancer and probably heart disease, and a year later Mr. Nader published his book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which labeled the compact Chevrolet Corvair, with its engine mounted in the rear, as a “One-Car Accident.” Emerging as the Senate’s leading staff expert on tobacco control legislation, Mr. Pertschuk was recruited by Senator Warren G. Magnuson, the Oregon Democrat who was chairman of the Commerce Committee. Mr. Pertschuk served as a counsel to the committee from 1964 to 1968 and as chief counsel and staff director from 1968 to 1977, when he was named chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.He relinquished the chairmanship after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 but remained a commissioner until 1984. During his tenure he forced the funeral industry to itemize its charges, but as the climate for regulation cooled, he failed in his effort to ban TV commercials aimed at marketing sugary foods to children.On leaving office, Mr. Pertschuk blamed the Republican administration for fostering de-regulaton, he said, whose “extremism and ideological blindness led to a new era of regulatory nihilism and just plain nuttiness.”Mr. Pertschuk’s first marriage, in 1954, to Carleen Joyce Dooley, ended in divorce in 1976. He married Anna Phillips Sofaer in 1977.In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Amy and Mark Pertschuk; a stepson, Daniel Sofaer; and three grandchildren.He and his wife moved from Washington to Santa Fe in 2003.Asked what motivated Mr. Pertschuk to embark on his consumer crusade, Joan Claybrook, who headed another of his progenies, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, during the Carter administration, said in a phone interview: “The facts. The more he learned, the more adamant he became. The more he learned about tobacco, the more outraged he became and the more determined he was to do something about it. And he was in a position of enormous power to do something about it.”After leaving government, Mr. Pertschuk founded, with David Cohen, a former president of Common Cause, the Advocacy Institute, which trained social justice adherents in the United States and emerging democracies.Mr. Pertschuk explained why he hadn’t capitalized on his enormous congressional and commission experience by going to work for a law firm, or for corporate clients or for foreign governments.“There is a career to be made out of the craft of lobbying for things you believe in,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “You may lag behind your contemporaries in BMW’s, if not Cuisinarts, but it really is worth it.”“This is more fun,” he said. More