Stellantis warns owners to stop driving cars after fatal airbag explosions

A volatile chemical in the inflator is at the root of the deadly malfunction

Air Bag Deaths (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Stellantis — formerly Fiat Chrysler — is warning the owners of 276,000 older-model vehicles to stop driving them after Takata airbag explosions killed three more people.

Owners of Dodge Mangum wagons, Dodge Challenger and Charger muscle cars, and Chrysler 300-series sedans from 2005-2010 should stop driving their vehicles due to a danger posed by the airbags, reports the Associated Press,

The faulty airbags have killed 32 people worldwide. Of those incidents, 23 have occurred in the US.

Per the AP, Stellantis said it confirmed that in two cases, the airbags’ inflators blew apart and caused the deaths. It suspects that a similar rupture caused a third death. All three of the deaths occurred within the past seven months.

In 2015, Stellantis issued a recall on the vehicles and offered a free repair to fix the issues with the airbags. The company told the AP that it tried numerous times to reach the owners of the vehicles but noted that sometimes people cannot be reached or do not respond to recalls.

“The longer these particular vehicles remain unrepaired, the greater the risk of an air bag rupture,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Air Bag Deaths (Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The company that produces the airbags, Takata, reportedly incorporated ammonium nitrate into the process needed to inflate the airbags during a crash. This relied on a small explosion, which the nitrate helped create. However, the chemical can become more volatile over time if exposed to long cycles of high temperatures and moisture in the air.

This essentially turns the airbag into something akin to a grenade — upon inflation, the volatile nitrate blows apart the airbag’s housing and hurls shrapnel into the vehicle’s cabin.

According to the AP, the danger posed by the airbags led to the largest series of recalls in US history. At least 67 million airbag inflators were recalled, but the US government noted that millions have still not been replaced.