eBay Bans Airbag Sales Over Faulty and Counterfeit Parts

SAN JOSE, Calif.: eBay has banned sales of airbags and many kinds of airbag parts in the United States, joining Amazon, Facebook Marketplace and other large platforms that already prohibit them, NPR reported on Sept. 24.

eBay has not said what prompted the change. The company declined an interview with NPR and pointed instead to an online statement saying the decision followed "a comprehensive review of the risks these products may pose to eBay users."

A Federal Probe and a Journal Investigation

The timing tracks two earlier findings. In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released investigation results showing that certain substandard airbag inflators imported from China were responsible for a dozen deaths or serious injuries since 2023. In July, The Wall Street Journal traced the origins of several faulty and possibly counterfeit airbag components and found that one had been bought as an aftermarket part on eBay.

An airbag is closer to a pyrotechnic device than a cushion. Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told NPR that a defective inflator can become brittle and break apart, sending fragments "flying at your face" when the bag deploys. A counterfeit may look like a brand-name part, skip proper testing, or fail to deploy at all.

How eBay Says It Will Enforce the Ban

In an emailed statement to NPR, eBay said it would use seller compliance audits, filtering algorithms and AI-supported monitoring. That is the hard part. William Wallace, director of safety advocacy at Consumer Reports, called the problem "a game of Whack-A-Mole" and said faulty or fake airbags could still appear on other sites.

Rosemary Shahan, president of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, welcomed the decision. "It's a good thing that eBay is no longer going to be offering airbags or airbag components on their platform. And it's about time," she said.

Amazon, Meta, Temu and Alibaba Moved First

eBay is late to this policy. Amazon, the largest U.S. online retailer, already prohibits airbag sales. So do Meta's Facebook Marketplace and the Chinese shopping sites Temu and Alibaba. Alibaba told NPR it banned airbags over safety concerns in 2014 and later extended the ban to components "to halt potential fakes," using algorithms to block listings before they go live.

The spread of cheap goods shipped directly from China has been a policy fight for some time. TradeFlock covered how the end of the de minimis exemption was expected to raise prices at Shein, Temu and Amazon. Amazon, for its part, has also shown it will police what third parties can do on its site, most recently when it blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent.

Wallace's point is that bans alone have not kept bad airbags off the road. "It's one thing to have a policy in place banning the sale of airbags," he said. "It's an entirely different thing to actually see the sale of airbags stop." Fake parts are also hard to recall, because they are sold as something else and their importers are difficult to trace.

Where Replacement Airbags Come From Now

The risk sits mostly with used cars. New vehicles come with manufacturer-certified airbags. When one has to be replaced after a crash and the original part is no longer available, a mechanic or owner may go shopping online, which is the channel eBay has now closed.

The scale of past failures explains the caution. NHTSA's largest airbag recall, which began in 2014 over Takata inflators used by Honda, Toyota, Nissan and others, covered an estimated 67 million airbags in the U.S. Takata later filed for bankruptcy and was sentenced to pay more than $1 billion in criminal penalties.

Owners have a few ways to check a car's history. Carfax offers a free check for prior deployment, and a CLUE report from LexisNexis lists insurance claims from the previous seven years. Mueller told NPR the only sure test is an inspection by an experienced mechanic.