07/10/2026
Eui Seok Kang lost control of his Chevrolet Malibu in torrential rain late one night in October 2023, spun sideways across two lanes of a Texas road and was struck by a pickup truck. When his air bag deployed, it tore apart his jaw.
“I couldn’t breathe, I felt like something was stuck in my throat,” Kang recalled in an interview. He lost half of his lower jaw, most of his lower teeth and some upper teeth. Over the next month, he underwent three surgeries, including for an infection and facial reconstruction.
The air bag, it turned out, had been purchased on eBay and installed by the Texas dealership that sold him the used car. When he crashed, it sent metal shards flying into Kang’s face.
Kang survived, which made him luckier than others. The aftermarket air bag in his Malibu contained a dangerous component tied to at least 10 fatalities in the U.S. since 2023, according to a later report by federal safety officials and a government email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Three others have been severely injured, including a driver as recently as June in Louisville, Ky.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is racing to stop more drivers from being killed or injured by air-bag parts it says appeared to originate from the Chinese manufacturer called Jilin Province Detiannuo Safety Technology, also known as DTN Airbag.
In a response to NHTSA in April, that company said it doesn’t do business in the U.S. and that it believes the part in question, which was stamped with a serial number associated with the firm, was “a counterfeit of our product manufactured by another company.” The company and lawyers previously representing DTN didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Air bags have saved tens of thousands of lives, but they can pose dangers to drivers when improperly assembled replacements are installed in used cars whose original bags have deployed in a previous accident. Such replacements, sometimes labeled with counterfeit logos of American carmakers, are widely available online. That counterfeit supply chain has long been a concern for automakers, who employ teams to scour for fake parts out of reputational fear and to protect customers.
NHTSA investigators have been forced to play a game of whack-a-mole against a complex, gray-market supply chain to figure out which cars might have had air bags with the parts installed, according to emails and documents reviewed by the Journal.
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