How Deadly Airbags Are Getting Inside Cars

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Live from New York, it's The Journal.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:03)
That's right, Jess and I are back with another live show in New York City. This time on Wednesday, September 9th.

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We're gonna be at City Winery for an evening of sharp reporting, insider conversation, and special guests.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:14)
And probably wine?

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I hope so. Either way, you won't want to miss it.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:19)
Tickets are on sale now. Check out the link in our show notes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
See you there. See you there.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:29)
A few years ago, Ui-Sok Kang was living in Texas, where he was going to flight school.

**Ryan Felton** (0:34)
He was driving along a Texas highway in a used Chevy Malibu he had bought earlier that year. And he lost control of his car while he was driving.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:49)
Kang is originally from South Korea. Our colleague Ryan Felton recently interviewed him about that night through a translator.

**Ryan Felton** (0:56)
Can you walk through from there just what happened in the moments before you lost control of the car?

**Ui-Sok Kang** (1:08)
That day was heavy rain and my car was hydroplaning on the highway.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:16)
Kang's car slid across the road, right into the path of a pickup truck. The two collided, and Kang's front airbag went off, and the car came to a stop.
He started to take stock of what had happened.

**Ui-Sok Kang** (1:30)
I called a friend I was supposed to meet, and then I tried to call a friend who was I going to meet.
But you know, I was not connected, but I could not talk, like I could not physically speak. That's when I first realized, oh, this could be very serious.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:48)
Kang's face was badly injured. But the thing that hurt him wasn't the other vehicle. It was something inside his own car, his airbag.
Metal pieces inside the airbag blew apart and severely damaged his jaw, neck and face. He underwent three surgeries in the month after the accident.

**Ryan Felton** (2:12)
He's had other procedures since then and more or less had to have skin move to his jaw in order to be able to open and close his mouth like he would normally.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:26)
All things considered, Kang was lucky. He survived the accident and moved on with his life, albeit with some scars.
But that's not been the case for other people that this has happened to.

**Ui-Sok Kang** (2:40)
I am one of the very few survivors.

**Ryan Felton** (2:44)
Ten people have died and three people have been severely injured. There's a 17-year-old high school senior whose mom bought her her first car.
She died after this airbag exploded. There was a middle school teacher. She died after her car had one of these airbag parts explode. A 20-year-old kid in Mississippi, he died earlier this year after the airbag exploded.

**Ryan Knutson** (3:13)
The airbags that are exploding are believed to be counterfeit, and regulators are having a hard time tracking them down, or even figuring out how many there are on the road right now.

**Ryan Felton** (3:25)
They roughly estimate there could be 10,000 of them, but they really don't know, and it just amounts to this really terrible game of whack-a-mole.

**Ryan Knutson** (3:36)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Friday, July 24th.
Coming up on the show, the bomb lurking inside some cars.

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**Ryan Knutson** (4:38)
It's almost too obvious to point out that airbags exist to save lives. That's why they were initially rolled out back in the 1970s.

**Ryan Felton** (4:48)
They were kind of designed in response to people overwhelmingly refusing to wear their seatbelts, you know, believe it or not.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:58)
Sort of like a fallback, I guess. Yeah. If you won't put on the thing that we know will help you.

**Ryan Felton** (5:03)
Right. They're known to be responsible for saving, you know, at this point it's now 50,000 lives over 30 years.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:12)
And they're pretty sophisticated devices. Every airbag includes sensors to recognize when a crash is happening, an inflator to blow up the bag, and then the cloth airbag itself. And everything has to work in a split second.