Month: May 2023

Enlarge / The E46 BMW 3 Series is highly appreciated by enthusiasts, but there's no excuse to not have replaced the Takata airbag by now. (credit: BMW)

In 2015, the largest automotive recall in US history began, due to faulty airbag inflators manufactured by the automotive supplier Takata. At first, 32 million cars were recalled, but the following year, that number grew to as many as 67 million airbags in 42 million vehicles, with at least 24 people killed due to the defective parts. But quite a few recalled cars have not yet had their airbags replaced, and on Thursday, BMW issued a "do not drive" warning to approximately 90,000 owners, telling them to park their vehicles if they have not been fixed.

The problem is a lack of a desiccant or chemical drying agent that would otherwise prevent the ammonium nitrate propellant from taking on moisture due to long-term exposure to heat and humidity. As the propellant ages and takes on moisture, it can fail to properly inflate the airbag during a crash and may even throw metal shrapnel around the vehicle interior.

Takata knew from testing as early as 2000 that some of its airbags might not deploy properly, with the first US incident occurring in 2004. In 2009, a driver in Oklahoma was killed when the airbag in a Honda Accord ruptured, and later that year, Honda recalled half a million cars to fix the problem.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gladwell via Getty)

The UK competition watchdog is launching a review of the artificial intelligence market, including the models behind popular chatbots such as ChatGPT, as the industry comes increasingly into global regulators’ crosshairs.

Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the UK Competition and Markets Authority, said the watchdog would examine so-called foundation models—such as the software underlying ChatGPT—and “how the markets around those models are developing.”

She told the Financial Times that the regulator would assess “the real opportunities there” but also “what kind of guardrails, what principles, we should be developing in terms of ensuring that competition is working effectively [and] consumers are being protected.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 176,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

2 years, 6 months

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data.

If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months.