Anti-Counterfeiting Council asks repair shops to be on lookout for fake air bags
A recent presentation given to the California Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR) Advisory Group stressed the dangers of counterfeit air bags, and encouraged repair shops to report possible counterfeits.
Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council (A2C2) Jon Ruttencutter and Bob Stewart, A2C2 president, presented the information to the group.
“We’re asking technicians when a car comes into the shop and they see something that just doesn’t seem right, we’re giving them some tools to reach out to us and say, ‘Hey, can you take a look at this?’ We’ll be glad we have teams that come out,” Ruttencutter said. “We can share photos. We know what we’re looking for. We have all the engineers for every brand that’s part of A2C2, and not part of A2C2 on standby to help verify if this bag could have been a danger, even after the fact.”
A2C2 has talked with all levels of the government — local, state, and federal — but realized they were missing an audience by not talking to technicians, he added.
“We’ve been successful in passing state [air bag] legislation,” Ruttencutter said. “California is one of the first states to accepte our legislation proposal and made it so it’s illegal to install and be involved in counterfeit air bags. We do work with the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Justice investigators. They have active cases in California.”
Referencing the slide above, Ruttencutter said based on the damages, one wouldn’t think the collisions were deadly. However, all of the vehicles were equipped with counterfeit air bags, he said.
“All three of these vehicles resulted in the driver being fatally injured,” he said. “They didn’t walk away. These are all collisions that have been under 30 miles an hour… When that air bag was told to deploy, it deployed in a manner that injured and killed the drivers.
“We’ve had six fatalities and three serious injuries — that’s just what we know. We know there’s much more happening out there.”
Counterfeit air bags usually underdeploy or overdeploy, according to Ruttencutter.
“We’ve been fighting this for a very long time and we do fight with the online platforms and other sources out of China to hamper this,” Ruttencutter said. “In the last few years, we’ve been taking our messages out to the field — talking to technicians, talking to insurance companies, talking to folks that could really help us put an impact on stopping the dangers of counterfeit auto parts, specifically counterfeit air bags.”
OEM air bags are meticulously engineered for safety and correct deployment, then rigorously tested following high standards, he added.
“There’s a lot of folks making air bags that aren’t meeting those standards, that don’t even come close to even trying to meet the standard. They’re selling it for pure profit,” Ruttencutter said.
Stewart added that OEM air bags are the only ones that test to meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard criteria. The engineering that goes into creating safe air bags is unbelieveable, he said.
“The tear seams — how far apart they are, the plasticity of the material to make sure that it ruptures, to make sure that that emblem doesn’t come up, it is crazy,” Stewart said. “I think that the aftermarket doesn’t want to play in that space with all the liability because one of the things with air bag systems is they have to comply with FMVSS 208, which is a system, so the whole vehicle. For the aftermarket to make sure that they complied with that, they’d have to buy these vehicles and put them through the crash testing that happens when the vehicles are designed. I just don’t think it’s a place to play in.”
The above photos show an air bag that deployed late.
“You can see the pieces of the air bag that were flying through the air — those pieces are what kill the drivers,” Ruttencutter said. “Some of the pieces for this particular test up in the GM facility actually landed about 30 feet in the air. They had to get a scaffolding system to bring the piece back down. All these airbags you’re seeing today were purchased online and could be installed.”
He added that automakers buy a lot of non-OEM air bags for testing purposes to support law enforcement and litigation. None of them have ever deployed properly, and some didn’t deploy at all, according to Ruttencutter.
CARFAX estimates 56,000 cars are currently on the road in California without genuine air bags; however, A2C2 believes that number is extremely low, Ruttencutter said.
A2C2 has calls with eBay, Facebook, and Alibaba every month “pushing to get them to do more on their platforms to prevent the sale of counterfeit auto parts,” Ruttencutter said.
“I will say openly that all the platforms have prohibited the sales of counterfeit air bags, except for eBay,” Ruttencutter said.
A2C2 is currently investigating DTN, which Ruttencutter said manufactures counterfeit air bag inflators.
And the concern isn’t solely with air bags.
“There’s brake pads, there’s oil filters, there’s spark plugs, there’s key fobs, there’s keys — all those are important to us,” Ruttencutter said. “We use the air bag messages out there, but all kinds of auto parts are a danger… Every part can be counterfeited. We have encountered every single part of a car to be counterfeited.”
For example, A2C2 found out about a fatal crash that killed a family of six because a counterfeit rim busted and sent the vehicle off a ridge, he said.
A rising issue as well is refurbished seatbelts using seatbelt parts bought online, he added.
A2C2 is also working with Tesla on combating counterfeit EV parts, Ruttencutter said.
Images
Featured image credit: Vershinin/iStock
Presentation slides provided by A2C2 and California BAR Advisory Group via YouTube
More information
Wall Street Journal: NHTSA believes Chinese aftermarket air bag parts connected to five deaths