How Deadly Airbags Are Getting Inside Cars

0:00Live from New York, it's The Journal.

0:03Ryan Knutson:That's right. Jess and I are back with another live show in New York City, this time on Wednesday, September 9th. We're going to be at City Winery for an evening of sharp reporting, insider conversation, and special guests. And probably wine? I hope so. Either way, you won't want to miss it. Tickets are on sale now. Check out the link in our show notes. See you there.

0:27Ryan Knutson:A few years ago, Ui Sok Kang was living in Texas, where he was going to flight school. 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. Kang is originally from South Korea. Our colleague Ryan Felton recently interviewed him about that night through a translator. Can you walk through from there just what happened in the moments before you lost control of the car?

1:15Ryan Knutson: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.

1:33And then I tried to call a friend who was I going to meet. But, you know, I got connected, but I could not talk. Like, I could not physically speak. And that's when I first realized, oh, this could be very serious.

1:48Ryan Knutson: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. He's had other procedures since then and more or less had to have skin moved to his jaw in order to be able to open and close his mouth like you would normally. 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.

2:40Ryan Knutson:I am one of the very few survivors. Ten people have died and three people have been severely injured. There's a 17-year-old high school senior whose mom bought her the 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.

3:12Ryan Knutson: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. They roughly estimate there could be 10 ,000 of them, but they really don't know. And it just kind of amounts to this really terrible game of whack-a-mole.

3:36Ryan Knutson:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, July 24th.

3:49Ryan Knutson:Coming up on the show, the bomb lurking inside some cars.

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5:08Ryan Knutson: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. They were kind of designed in response to people overwhelmingly refusing to wear their seatbelts, you know, believe it or not. Sort of like a fallback, I guess. Yeah. You won't put on the thing that we know will help you. Right. They're known to be responsible for saving, you know, at this point it's now 50 ,000 lives over 30 years. 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.

5:52Ryan Knutson:And everything has to work in a split second. They're now mandatory, and they're heavily regulated by a federal body called the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. They're essentially like a mini-explosive device, So you have, like, the regulations around the type of chemicals that are used, their design, and how they're supposed to inflate when a crash happens.

6:21Ryan Knutson:In a new car fresh off the assembly line, airbags are generally considered to be trustworthy. The issue is when an airbag has to be replaced, like after a crash. That's much more common in the used car market, where the vehicle's history isn't always clear. It's just a different market where you're really kind of going off the word of the dealers who are selling them, the Carfax reports being accurate if you're looking at them. Through court documents, Ryan was able to recreate the path of one defective airbag that made its way into a used car in Florida, a 2020 Chevy Malibu. The car originally was used as a rental car.

7:05In this case, Enterprise had it as a rental car. The rental got into an accident that was severe enough to cause the airbags to go off. The car was then sold at an auction. The person who bought it went and got an airbag to put into the car on eBay.

7:27Ryan Knutson:The person who bought it runs a repair shop and installed the aftermarket airbag. The car was then resold to a used car dealer. And then it got resold to this mother of two in Florida who had the airbag go off and exploded instead of just kind of properly inflating.

7:49Ryan Knutson:Her name was Destiny Biasi. Ryan says the crash she was in would have been survivable, But instead, after that airbag exploded, she died. Biasi's family ended up suing, and her case hit the local news. A lawsuit alleges her driver's side airbag system included counterfeit and non-compliant components, and that several fragments from the blast struck her in the face, head and neck, ultimately killing her. The auction house, the used car dealer, and Enterprise all said they were not aware of the faulty repair. The repair shop settled the lawsuit and declined to comment. Deadly parts, like the one that killed Biasi and that injured Kang, usually trigger a recall.

8:34In 99.99 % cases, when auto safety regulators learn of a defect, they basically can go to the automaker and say like, hey, do a recall.

8:45Ryan Knutson:During a recall of a part in a new car, car dealerships know who they sold their cars to, so they can get in touch with them and tell them something needs to be replaced. But with used cars, especially ones that have been repaired by a mechanic outside a dealership, that system breaks down. These faulty airbag parts are being bought and sold online from sites like eBay or Facebook Marketplace. The Nitz investigators have had to, like, essentially back their way into figuring out who sold it, who bought it, And it's like a very unwieldy process. As a result, a typical car recall is basically impossible.

9:26Ryan Knutson:So how do you even begin to track down where these faulty airbags are coming from? That's after the break.

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10:19Ryan Knutson:Since 2023, cases of airbag-related fatalities have grown, and investigators started seeing a pattern. It had to do with the airbag's inflators. That's the part Ryan described earlier as like a mini-explosive device. The inflators have, like, serial numbers and part numbers, and there was a specific part number that was visible in many of these crashes. it was essentially a clue to start on when digging into this. In at least one instance, the inflator parts weren't just present at the scene. They were physically lodged inside a victim. There was a really jarring case of a middle-aged man in Arizona.

11:01They found a shard of glass in his neck that had the unique part number on it.

11:09Ryan Knutson:The part number on that piece in the driver's neck was linked to a company in China known as DTN Airbag. They're pretty much this obscure company that I don't think really anyone more or less knew, at least in the auto industry, who they were until people essentially started Googling and searching for like what this part number meant. DTN has been selling airbag inflators for years. But DTN says they didn't make these airbag inflators And that they're not responsible They basically said, we don't sell in the United States We don't know how this product got there We're not even sure if it's our product You know, anyone who buys it, it's on them to certify and do tests to ensure that it's safe

12:01Ryan Knutson:Either way, parts labeled as DTNs were showing up in airbags in the U.S. In large part, because they're so cheap. A real airbag replacement from an automaker can run you$1 ,000. So, there's incentive if you can find an airbag that you think is solid and genuine, that's hundreds of dollars or even one-tenth of the cost. There's a clear economic incentive as to why you might seek out airbags on online marketplaces. So there's a big demand for less expensive options. And counterfeiters have stepped in to fill that demand. Some counterfeit airbags are actually smuggled into the U.S., like they're a drug or an endangered species.

12:47And, you know, in some cases, we were told that these are showing up at ports, you know, stuffed inside things like toys and dollhouses.

12:58Ryan Knutson:Over the last decade, more than a dozen people have been convicted by the Justice Department for selling counterfeit airbags. And a single unscrupulous importer can bring in thousands of potentially faulty ones. The most recent person was a former North Carolina State Transportation Department employee. They had found that he, over a two-year period through early to mid-2024, he was importing airbags and then would turn around and sell them on Facebook Marketplace. The man imported about 2 ,500 counterfeit airbags with the logos of several automakers on them. He wasn't acting alone. He was part of a larger counterfeiting ring that was also selling parts with DTN logos on them, according to regulators.

13:49His case kind of exposed this ring involving folks from the United Kingdom who were buying these parts that were tied to this company from China, assembling them into airbags and being shipped over here.

14:03Ryan Knutson:In that case, the importer ended up being convicted of selling counterfeit goods, and he went to jail for just over a year. The U.S. attorney's office who investigated the case involving the North Carolina employee said, quote, the worry here is that a bunch of consumers are going to unwittingly purchase bombs and put them in their steering columns. But ultimately, the thing that authorities were able to pin on him wasn't that he was selling potentially deadly car parts. It was for a trademark violation.

14:38Ryan Knutson:Still, federal investigators are trying to take action. Throughout 2025, NHTSA and investigators were learning of more accidents. And then in October, they officially opened up an investigation to try to get more detailed information from DTN and also from websites that have been found to be selling counterfeit airbags in the past, like Facebook and eBay. eBay is cooperating with NHTSA's investigation. It said it works diligently to prevent and remove unsafe product listings, and that it prohibits counterfeit products. Facebook said its rules prohibit the purchase, sale, or trade of certain vehicle parts and accessories, including airbags.

15:18Ryan Knutson:Following its investigation, NHTSA ended up banning the parts of the DTN label that are linked to the fatalities. It also worked with tech companies to trace who they thought bought the products online and send them letters of warning. But beyond that, they're pretty much just trying to raise awareness. That's essentially all they can do. So what can consumers do? How can people keep themselves safe? The shortest answer is if you're going to look for a car and it has some accident history reported with it, the first thing to know is did the airbags go off in that accident? Carfax lets you check for airbag deployments associated with your unique vehicle identification number.

16:01So it basically amounts to like you got to know your vehicle's history.

16:05Ryan Knutson:Nobody knows for sure how many of these dangerous airbag inflators are still out there. The most recent known crash where a faulty DTN marked inflator went off was just this past June in Louisville, Kentucky.

16:21Ryan Knutson:I mean, it feels like this is also sort of a story about, like, the race to the bottom in online marketplaces, that, like, anybody in the world can put something on Amazon or eBay or on a website and sell it, then that's kind of great because, you know, now you can get cheap stuff. But, like, in this case, we're talking about an airbag, like a critical piece of safety technology. It's not like it's a T-shirt or a toaster. It's tough. It's tough to know what to say because, like, so many things have gone wrong to lead to this situation. And there's a very substantial number of people who sell stuff on the Internet.

17:02and it does include things like safety devices and we're just sort of seeing the really kind of like potentially terrifying results of that.

17:18Ryan Knutson:By the way, this Sunday, we have another episode in our special series about all the ways that work is changing. Last Sunday's episode was about influencers and this week, it's about working from home. I hope you'll check it out. That's all for today, Friday, July 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Laura Benchoff, Catherine Brewer, Evelyn Vajardo Alvarez, Pia Gedkari, Max Green, Sophie Kottner, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Jivika Verma, Catherine Whelan, Tatiana Zamis, and me.

18:02Ryan Knutson:Ryan Knudsen. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. And this is Laura Benchoff's Last Week with us. Laura, we're going to miss you so much. Please stay in touch. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week by Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapak, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Nicole Pasolka. Thanks for listening. See you Sunday.