Quest to save a few dollars per air bag led to a deadly crisis

New York

IN THE late 1990s, General Motors got an unexpected and enticing offer. A little-known Japanese supplier, Takata, had designed a much cheaper automotive air bag.

GM turned to its air bag supplier - the Swedish-American company Autoliv - and asked it to match the cheaper design or risk losing the carmaker's business, according to Linda Rink, who was a senior scientist at Autoliv assigned to the GM account at the time.

But when Autoliv's scientists studied the Takata air bag, they found that it relied on a dangerously volatile compound in its inflater, a critical part that causes the air bag to expand.

"We just said, 'No, we can't do …