Same stuff Timothy McVeigh used, fertilizer and kerosene.
Takata has said it continues to use ammonium nitrate in its replacement airbags.
But, why should we expect them to be any better?
But the engineering team in the Moses Lake plant raised objections to basing a propellant on such a risky compound. To bolster its case, the team pointed to explosives manuals warning that the compound “tended to disintegrate on storage under widely varying temperature conditions” with “irregular ballistic” consequences, Mr. Lillie said.
Ammonium nitrate cycles through five solid states. As the vehicle goes from receiving the heat of sunshine to the cold overnight, the temperature swing is large enough for the ammonium nitrate to change from one phase to another, experts say. Ammonium nitrate also absorbs moisture from the atmosphere readily. Those two things together make ammonium nitrate tablets prone to damage, experts say.
A focus in the mushrooming recalls has been that the airbags are more susceptible to malfunction in high humidity areas.
“Speaking generally, ammonium nitrate can be unstable. Its crystal structure can change according to temperature,” said Katsumi Kato, an assistant professor in safety engineering at Japan’s Fukuoka University. “It changes the burn rate. It leads to various malfunctions.”
Other airbag makers have said they stayed away from the explosive compound.