Class action lawsuit accuses three automotive manufacturers of knowingly selling vehicles with risky air bag inflators

A class action lawsuit is accusing three automakers and a parts manufacturer of knowingly selling vehicles containing air bag inflators that are at risk of exploding. Two deaths and at least four injuries have been linked to such explosions.

The federal lawsuit, filed on May 24 in San Francisco, names ARC Automotive Inc. of Knoxville, Tennessee, which made the inflators and sold them to air bag manufacturers. The air bag makers, in turn, sold them to General Motors, Ford and Volkswagen, which are named in the lawsuit, too.

The five plaintiffs are the owners of vehicles with ARC inflators who contend the defective air bag parts were not disclosed when they made their purchases.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been investigating ARC inflators for nearly seven years without a resolution, estimates that there are 51 million on U.S. roads. That’s somewhere between 10% and 20% of all passenger vehicles.

Yet most drivers have no conclusive way to determine whether their vehicle contains an ARC inflator. Even if they were to tear apart the steering wheel assembly, the internal parts might bear the markings only of the automaker or the air bag manufacturer, not the inflator maker.

“You could have a ticking time bomb in your lap and you’ve got no way of knowing,” said Frank Melton, a Florida lawyer who is among those filing the new lawsuit.

The plaintiffs allege that ARC’s inflators use ammonium nitrate as a secondary propellant to inflate the air bags. The propellant is pressed into tablets that can expand and develop microscopic holes if exposed to moisture. Degraded tablets have a larger surface area, causing them to burn too fast and ignite too big of an explosion, according to the lawsuit.

The explosion can blow apart a metal canister housing the chemical, sending metal shards into the cabin. Ammonium nitrate, used in fertilizer and as a cheap explosive, is so dangerous that it can burn too fast even without moisture present, the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs allege that ARC inflators have blown apart seven times on U.S. roads and two other times in testing by ARC. There have so far been five limited recalls of the inflators that totaled about 5,000 vehicles, including three recalls by GM.

Auto safety advocates say the case seems to mirror the Takata air bag saga that began in the early 2000s, which also involved exploding air bag inflators and resulted in 28 deaths worldwide, hundreds of injuries and the largest automotive recall in U.S. history. So far NHTSA has gathered information but hasn’t forced any wider recalls from its investigation that began in July of 2015.

Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies Inc., which conducts research for lawyers that sue automakers as well as for other groups, noted that just as in the early stages of the Takata ordeal, many ARC ammonium nitrate inflators remain in use.

“It’s almost like Groundhog Day here,” said Kane, who asserts that NHTSA should have acted already. “It’s not a question of whether it can kill or injure people. It already has.”

ARC, the lawsuit alleges, knew about the danger of ammonium nitrate in patent applications it filed in 1995 and 1998. In 2019, after several ARC inflators blew apart, ARC acknowledged that its use was not acceptable for automotive air bags, according to the lawsuit.

The suit asserts that General Motors, which began recalling Takata ammonium nitrate inflators in 2013, should have known that ARC’s inflators were also unstable.

The lawsuit also names Volkswagen and Ford as defendants, alleging that they represented the air bag inflators as safe while knowing they were dangerous.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating ARC inflators in 2015 after an Ohio woman was injured when an inflator exploded in a Chrysler minivan. At the time the agency estimated that there were 490,000 ARC inflators on the nation’s roads.

The review was elevated to an engineering analysis — a step closer to a product recall — in 2016 after the death in Canada.

Though a seven-year investigation is longer than most NHTSA reviews, inflators are particularly complex, said David Friedman, a former NHTSA acting administrator who is now a vice president at Consumer Reports.

Automakers appear to be balking at recalls for cost reasons, Friedman said. And NHTSA, he suggested, needs a “slam dunk” case before seeking recalls because of threats and lawsuits that automakers have filed in the past.

“That’s one of the things that’s broken in the system,” he said.