The last few years have been rather rough on Takata. Once the firm could accurately have been described as a fairly anonymous auto parts supplier. Your car may have contained some components made by Takata, but you were likely unaware of just what they were. That has changed rather significantly has it has come to light that the firm has produced a large number of defective airbags. Defective in the sense that they explode and send shrapnel into the car as opposed to inflating. To date, numerous automakers have recalled over 24 million vehicles in the US. To put that number in perspective, total car sales in the US set a record at 17.5 million last year.

As you might expect, the firm has been involved in the requisite activities of apologizing and ass-covering. As part of the latter, they commissioned a committee led by a former transportation secretary to review how the firm has managed. The resulting report doesn’t pick a particularly nice picture (Takata Lacks Processes for Tackling Air-Bag Defects, Panel Says, Wall St. Journal, Feb 2).

Takata Corp., the supplier behind defective air bags in millions of recalled vehicles, lacks clear processes for tackling potential safety defects and needs improved manufacturing methods, an outside panel the company commissioned found. Takata employees tasked with raising safety concerns don’t have well-defined roles and rely on reports from auto makers about quality problems instead of ferreting out problems themselves, according to the report from the panel led by Samuel Skinner, the former transportation secretary under President George H.W. Bush. The report found Takata lacked its own program for spotting defects in air bags once they’re installed in vehicles that now typically stay on U.S. roads for more than a decade.

In some ways this is just an amazing story. Few industries put as much emphasis on quality and reliability as the auto industries. Cars present an interesting combination of high volume and high consequences. When things go wrong with, say, a cell phone, customers get annoyed but are rarely exposed to extreme risk. Having even a small component fail in a moving vehicle can be calamitous. But Takata is depicted as not deeply invested in getting things right or monitoring how its products are faring.