Every year, millions of people are involved in car crashes.
Often the airbags pop out just in the nick of time and save a life. Sometimes they don't open, 10 Investigates' Paul Aker reported.
Several years ago, Herbert Huff was headed to work along a Cleveland highway when he did not see the car ahead slowing down and rear-ended it.
He was going fast enough to total his 1993 Dodge Intrepid. Yet, for some reason, Huff's airbags never deployed.
"(The responding police officer) was surprised I wasn't hurt and the airbags didn't go off," Huff said.
Huff wrote to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to complain. A 10 Investigates analysis of federal records showed that in the past decade, 180 Ohio residents voluntarily complained to the federal government when their airbags failed to open in a crash.
"I think somebody needs to find out why," Huff said.
10 Investigates discovered that airbags sometimes simply don't work. According to the NHTSA, the failures have involved at least 400 deaths in five years.
What's more is that 10 Investigates discovered something that might contribute to the problems. Some cars have body parts that could cause an airbag system to fail.
Often, repair technicians replace parts that affect airbag deployment. But body repair specialists said that insurance companies push them to install untested imitation parts.
A federal government report said that body shops install billions of dollars worth of the untested parts each year.
"Absolutely it's not safe," said Phil Mosley, a master auto technician.
Mosley said that the non-factory authorized parts could react differently in a crash.
Cars have sections called crumple zones that are designed to absorb collision energy by collapsing in a certain way. Sensors linked to airbags calculate the rate the car is decelerating, partly based on the speed in which parts collapse.
If the new, non-factory parts collapse faster, slower or differently than the original parts, experts said the airbags that are supposed to save lives might go off at the wrong time or not at all.
"I know it's happening," Mosley said. "I'm confident it's happening."
How different are the imitation parts from the factory parts? We found fenders with metals so different magnets stick to one, but not the other. A bumper reinforcement, which is critical to crumple zones, was made in Taiwan by a non-authorized manufacturer. The welds were visibly different, Aker reported.
"We're re-engineering the car," Mosley said. "We're re-engineering the structure of the car."
The concern is shared by many other experts, Aker reported. According to a report distributed by an auto industry trade organization, repairs to crumple zones that don't match factory specification are "risky for the timing sequence. This can fool the sensor and airbags may not deploy."
The car companies have released their own warnings against using the imitation parts and Charles Territo, the senior director with the Auto Alliance, representing car manufacturers' interests said, "failure to deploy is a real concern because (the parts) are designed to act as a system."
Since the original system is crash-tested and systems with imitation parts are not, a lot of people who fix cars are concerned.
"That has never been tested by the manufacturer to know that in a second collision is everything going to operate like it did the first time," said Randall Blanchard, a body shop owner.
According to Blanchard, in most cases, the customer is unaware that changes are occurring in their car.
"The insurance company is generally writing these parts because they're less expensive," Blanchard said.
In 2000, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety conducted a test on replacement parts and claimed the cheaper, imitation parts had no effect on crashworthiness.
Other experts have disputed the findings. That's why the General Accounting Office suggested that the controversy could not be cleared up unless the National Highway Transportation Administration conducted a comprehensive study.
Nearly eight years later, an in-depth study has never been conducted, Aker reported.
An NHTSA spokesman said that his agency does not test for "hypotheticals," leaving concerns along highways, in body shops and with crash victims.
According to Ohio law, body shops must tell consumers if it wants to use imitation parts and the consumer must give express consent.
Repair technicians who spoke with 10 Investigates said that a lot of shops don't ask for consent. If they do, customers have no idea what the crash parts could do in another crash.
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