The driver of another vehicle in an oncoming lane veered into our client’s lane, causing a head-on frontal crash. Although the crash was severe, the driver airbag did not deploy, and the driver suffered lung, heart and other chest injuries that proved fatal.

2000 Ford Taurus Airbag Failed to Deploy

 A download of the vehicle’s Restraint Control Module (the “black box”) documented the failure of the front crash sensor during the crash. My inspection of that crash sensor revealed that its wiring had been cut.  This had occurred early in the crash, right near where the crash sensor was mounted.

Airbag Sensor Cut Wire

Evidence gathered during our investigation indicated that the air bag system was programmed in a way that “shut off” the airbag if the sensor wire were cut during an accident.  In my opinion, this should never have happened.  First of all, a front airbag crash sensor should be mounted in a way that protects its wiring from being cut during a crash, since it is certainly foreseeable that the front crush zone of a car will be damaged during a frontal crash.  Second, even if the wiring gets cuts, there is no reason to shut off the entire airbag system.  Instead, the airbag control module that contains an accelerometer should still continue to function; if the airbag safety sensor within the control module detects the crash, it can still deploy the airbags.  Why deprive the consumer of the safety benefit of the airbags?

Although this was apparently fixed in later models, this particular vehicle had not been recalled to correct this problem.  There is absolutely no excuse for such a decision.  If you have a known problem, just fix it.  Why wait until more people suffer serious personal injuries or death before correcting this safety defect?

Yes. In general, the air bag laws require a car company to design its air bags for all reasonably foreseeable users of their vehicles. Since people come in all shapes and sizes, and since the car companies know this, they must design their vehicles with this in mind. Not surprisingly, this was explicitly reinforced by an industry standard published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. And, in fact, the crash test dummies used for government crash testing for many decades are positioned using a procedure that is expressly based on the seating position of a large adult male.

Crash test dummies representing a 95th percentile adult male have been available for crash testing for more than 20 years. Injury criteria for this crash test dummy were developed by the industry decades ago. Unfortunately, our experience in air bag lawsuits has revealed that some car companies failed to conduct any crash testing with these crash test dummies. Some have claimed that they could not conduct such testing because the government did not incorporate the injury criteria into federal regulations at that time. This argument is completely unpersuasive.

First, the federal regulations are minimum standards, and do not represent the state-of-the-art. A manufacturer has always been free to exceed those standards, and could therefore have conducted such testing. Second, the injury criteria were published within the automotive industry, and the car companies could have utilized those published criteria to evaluate the risk of injury to large stature occupants. Third, if a particular car company disagreed with the published injury criteria, it could have developed its own standards. It is telling that those companies who claim that the injury criteria were not “validated” are the ones who never even tried to evaluate or validate them. Fourth, significant information about crash test dummy kinematics (the motion of the crash test dummy during a crash) could be obtained even if the injury measurements were not made.

In my opinion, the car companies who try to justify their failure to use these large size crash test dummies are merely engaging in a junk science post-hoc rationalization of their failure to comply with industry standards.

Those car companies who failed to conduct appropriate testing with a reasonably foreseeable range of occupant sizes were negligent and reckless. In my opinion, this failure to test was often the result of putting profits ahead of safety. It costs money to conduct this testing. A prototype of an all-new vehicle line can cost as much as $500,000, with the actual test cost adding to the total; this provides an incentive for car companies to skip such testing. If the testing reveals a problem (such as contact of the occupant’s forehead with the windshield header, or a risk of neck injury), it can cost many millions of dollars to fix the problem. Those companies who fail to conduct appropriate testing create an unfair advantage by saving millions of dollars compared to those who do the right thing and conduct all appropriate testing to ensure their air bag systems work appropriately.

If you believe a car company cut corners in designing your air bag system and caused you to be injured in an accident, please feel free to call us toll-free at 1-888-834-5297 for a n0-charge consultation with an air bag lawyer and former air bag engineer / expert witness.

Airbag inflators are the component within an airbag system that produces the gas that inflates an airbag. For frontal airbags, there were two major types of inflators. One type used solid chemicals that burned very rapidly (less than 1/20th of a second) to produce nitrogen gas. The most common chemical for these inflators was sodium azide, which had been used in the defense armaments industry. The other type used stored gas (often a mixture of helium and argon) that was heated to expand it and fill the bag.

When either type of inflator deploys, the gas that is produced always contains byproducts of the combustion process. These byproducts can include dangerous gases as benzene and toluene, as well as particulates that appear to be smoke. This is one reason why many people involved in an accident where the airbags deployed report seeing smoke in the passenger compartment. These byproducts can cause significant breathing difficulties, particularly in those people who already suffer from asthma or other respiratory problems.

Through most of the 1990s, the cars produced by the car companies used a “one size fits all” inflator in their airbag systems. That meant that once your airbag sensors sent the deployment signal, the airbag would deploy with the same force regardless of the accident circumstances. So, you got the same airbag force in an 8 mph fender-bender as a highway-speed head-on collision. It didn’t matter whether you were a short woman or a big and tall man – it was always the same. However, dual stage inflators were feasible during that time frame; they would adjust the force of the deployment based on the severity of the accident. Most people don’t realize that such dual stage airbags were being sold by General Motors in the mid-1970s at its Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac dealers.

Since the late 1990s, car companies have returned to dual stage inflator technology, and are now using multi-stage technology. These inflators adjust the force of the deployment depending on such things as crash severity, seat belt use, seat position and occupant size.  Many of these airbag systems use advanced computer systems to adjust the inflator force; unfortunately, as with many other computer-based systems, they sometimes fail with devastating results.  Sometimes the airbag inflator deploys at full power when it should not have deployed at all.  At other times, the airbag inflator does not deploy at all when it should have, depriving the person of the safety benefits of their airbag.

With the complexity of today’s airbag systems, you need an experienced airbag attorney, preferably with an airbag engineering background, to determine whether your airbag system worked as intended during your accident.

Many airbag systems contain a “black box” that records certain information about a crash. General Motors (GM) calls it a Sensing and Diagnostic Module (SDM), Ford calls it a Restraints Control Module (RCM), and Chrysler calls it an Airbag Electronic Control Module (AECM) or Occupant Restraint Controller (ORC). Although the names vary widely depending on the manufacturer and year, their basic purpose is the same: to record certain information before, during and after crashes.

The earlier systems recorded information about the status of the airbag system, including any fault codes that were present, or that had been present, and the length of time the warning lamp had been on. Some of these systems had their reliability questioned, as the data download sometimes did not match what had been physically observed in the car.

By the mid to late 1990s, GM had the most systems in cars driven by consumers that could be downloaded using commercially available equipment. That meant that accident reconstruction experts, airbag experts, and police agencies could perform their own downloads of the information contained in the black box. The availability of such equipment was important, as the information is stored in the black box in hexadecimal format requiring conversion to understand it. It still takes expertise to interpret those downloads, and not all the information stored in the black box is converted with that type of equipment. These systems typically recorded the crash severity (change in velocity over time), airbag system status, problem history and, importantly, seat belt usage.

By the late 1990s, these black boxes recorded not only the vehicle conditions at the time of the crash, but also five seconds of pre-crash data. That data includes vehicle speed, vehicle braking, engine RPM, and throttle position. Some of this data can be recorded not only for actual crashes, but also certain near-crashes where the computer algorithm experienced enough acceleration to be enabled.

By the mid 2000s, the data captured by these black boxes had grown significantly. They can record the seat position, inflator staging, what specific parameter caused airbag deployment, whether the passenger airbag was suppressed, and many other things. Some even include the air temperature at the time of the accident. Some of these newer systems are automatically tied into crash response notification if the airbag deploys, such as through uploading to On-Star.

The ownership of the data within the black box is a developing field of the law. Generally, most states treat the owner of the vehicle or the lessee as the owner of the data generated when they owned or leased the vehicle. They would then presumably have some privacy protections. However, some “fine print” in the manuals of certain manufacturers contains exceptions from these privacy protections. I expect that these exceptions will be subject to litigation in the future. The ownership of the data also surfaces in certain criminal cases involving DUI, vehicular homicide or manslaughter and other cases. Criminal courts have often required a search warrant before a police agency can download such data.

The federal regulations relating to black box data are not very comprehensive. One federal agency, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has published rules on this topic. Incredibly, those regulations do not require a manufacturer to have a black box for their airbag system at all. However, if a manufacturer chooses do install a black box, those regulations standardize what data must be collected and how it must be accessible.

After an airbag deployment, some consumers report seeing one or two holes in their airbag. They then question whether their airbag deployed properly. The short answer is: it depends. This post will describe the various types of holes in airbag fabric, and some of their causes.

Some airbags are designed to have holes in them. These are called vent holes, because their purpose is to release or “vent” the gas that is inside the airbag. As the gas exits the vent holes, the airbag compresses, gradually slowing down your body during a crash. These vent holes are usually round, and can have a diameter of between about ¾ inch and 3 inches. The smaller vent holes are often used in driver airbags, with the larger vent holes used almost exclusively in passenger air bags. When you look at them, the circular shape should be fairly obvious. However, if the fabric around the edge of the vent is not reinforced, the pressure within the airbag during the crash can make the round hole more square in shape by slight tearing of the fabric. This can be normal, if they were designed to tear. In almost all cases, vent holes in a driver air bag should face to the front, away from you. Vent holes in a passenger air bag are generally on the sides of the airbag, and not in the portion of the fabric that you normally touch.

A few vehicles used “petal vents” which are semi-circular slits in a driver airbag. The intent is that these vents open up like a flap when the airbag is pressurized. Some believe that these vents are not nearly as efficient as traditional vent holes, and can be a sign of an inflator that over-pressurizes the airbag.

Holes in your airbag that are lengthy or irregular can be signs that your airbag tore during deployment. We have seen some instances where the fabric “catches” on a piece of the surrounding frame or cover. If this happens, your airbag did not perform as it should have, and you may not have been fully protected during your accident. In a few cases, large scale ripping of the airbag fabric (or its tethers) is caused by airbag inflators that are overly aggressive: their forcefulness simply rips the fabric apart during the deployment process. These are clearly defective.

In some other instances, you can have either a circular hole or an irregular hole in the fabric closest to the driver or passenger. These can be caused by defects in the airbag inflator that cause it to break apart. Loose pieces from such a defect can then be sent flying like shrapnel right through the bag. These same pieces can cause devastating injuries to a driver or passenger in their path.

A car company or supplier who produces defective airbags or airbag inflators should accept responsibility for their defect; if not, you should speak with an air bag lawyer knowledgeable about such issues.

Absolutely not! This is one of the most common misperceptions among consumers. In fact, most airbags vary widely in their design, materials and manufacturing. That means that some airbags protect you better than other airbags. It also means that some airbags are more dangerous than other airbags.

The differences among airbags extend to various characteristics. First, the inflators that generate the gas that fills the airbag can be of different types. Some used solid chemicals such as sodium azide to produce nitrogen gas. Others use stored gas; for example, some use a mixture of helium and argon. Some inflators deploy at the same force level, regardless of the accident severity. Others adjust the deployment forces based on the size and position of the passenger or based on the severity of the crash.

The fabric airbags themselves can also vary widely. Some are nylon, some are polyester. Some have vent holes, others don’t. Some are coated to control the amount of gas exhausted from the bag when the person pushes against it during a crash. Some reach so far toward the passenger that they can slam into their face at hundreds of miles per hour, even if the passenger has not yet moved in response to crash forces. Some are tethered to reduce this risk.

Airbag crash sensors can also vary widely by cars. In the early 1990s, most manufacturers used crash sensors mounted in the front of the car. By the mid 1990s, some of these manufacturers eliminated these front safety sensors, saving millions of dollars in the process. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of these manufacturers shifted back to systems that included front airbag crash sensors. Even so, our research and investigation has revealed that similar cars sold under different brand names fail to include such front crash sensors on some models, even though they are present in other models.

Sensing systems that fail to include front crush zone sensors can have many problems. They often have difficulty sensing real-world accidents quickly enough, which can result in late deployments that cause serious personal injuries or even a wrongful death from the airbag deployment. They can also fail to deploy the airbags in crashes involving a tree or utility pole. Some manufacturers made their remaining sensors too sensitive, in an attempt to create a cheap fix for these problems. This has resulted in numerous deployments where airbags were not intended to deploy, including rock impacts to an undercarriage and very minor crashes.

In short, there are significant differences among various airbag designs. There are also significant differences in the ways different car companies engineer their airbags, with some companies using shortcuts to reduce the amount of money they spend to engineer their airbags. Those airbags can be much more dangerous than other airbags.

One of the most common phone calls we receive is from consumers wondering why their air bag did not deploy during a crash.  This article describes how air bag deployment thresholds are established, the kinds of crashes during which air bags should deploy, and crashes where they may not deploy.  It also provides information on several different defects that may be responsible for the air bag failing to deploy when it should deploy.

AIR BAG DEPLOYMENT THRESHOLDS

Conventional air bags are generally designed to deploy in certain frontal crashes above the thresholds selected by the manufacturer.  Unfortunately, the consumer often cannot determine the thresholds for their car, as they vary widely between manufacturers, and even vary among different models from the same manufacturer.  However, there are some general guidelines that are helpful for consumers.

Although there were some variations, most frontal air bags from the 1990s were designed to deploy in crashes above a threshold level of 14 mph into a solid concrete barrier.  At the same time, most air bag systems were also designed to never deploy in crashes below 8 mph into a solid concrete barrier.  Between these two speeds, the air bags may or may not deploy, depending on the specifics of the accident and vehicle.

Airbag Deployment Threshold

The bottom line is this: airbag should always deploy in every crash where they are likely to prevent serious personal injury or a wrongful death.  If your crash severity exceeds the car company’s thresholds, and yet your air bags did not deploy, you may well have a defect in your vehicle’s air bag system.

CRASHES WHERE THE AIR BAG SHOULD DEPLOY

Your air bags should deploy in every crash where they will help prevent your injuries.  This means that your air bag should deploy in those crashes where you would otherwise suffer injuries of the type that the air bag is designed to prevent: head, neck, and chest injuries.  For example, your frontal air bag should deploy in an accident where your head would otherwise be injured from hitting your steering wheel.  Shown here is an example of an accident vehicle in which the air bags should have deployed.

Ford Airbag Failed to Deploy

Although frontal air bags are generally not designed to deploy in side impacts or rollovers, in some cases they should deploy in those kinds of crashes.  That is because some side impacts or rollovers also cause front-to-back deceleration that causes you to move forward inside your vehicle.  One example would be if you were driving at highway speed and were hit on the side of your car: in addition to crushing in the side of the car, your car would also slow down its forward motion rapidly, which could be enough to deploy your frontal air bags.  Similarly, frontal air bags should generally not deploy in rear impacts; however, if you are hit from behind and pushed into a car in front of you, that second impact to your car’s front end may justify deployment of your air bags.

For side impact air bags, they should generally deploy on the side of the car experiencing the side impact.  Similarly, rollover “curtain” air bags should deploy when the vehicle experiences a rollover, to help prevent head and neck injuries and to reduce the risk of being ejected through an open or shattered window.
     
Examples of crashes where air bag deployment would be expected include moderate to severe crashes involving your front bumper or the front corners of your vehicle, frontal impacts to a utility or telephone pole, and under-ride impacts where the front of your car goes under the side or back of a truck.

CRASHES WHERE THE AIR BAG SHOULD NOT DEPLOY

Your air bags should not deploy in those accidents where they will not prevent your injuries.  After all, air bags can deploy at speeds of more than 200 mph, and you should not be exposed to those kinds of forces if it won’t help you.  Thus, your frontal air bags should not deploy in side impacts, rear impacts and rollovers where there is no significant deceleration from front to back.  Other examples of crashes where your frontal air bags should not generally deploy include:

• Minor frontal crashes
• Most impacts to the undercarriage of the vehicle, such as when crossing a railroad, unless they would result in serious personal injury
• Impacts with animals such as deer or dogs
• Impacts with street curbs or parking blocks
• Driving on rough roads, including those with large potholes, gravel or bumps

Of course, your air bags should never deploy when your vehicle is not in an accident.  Although this seems obvious, there are actually many cases where this has occurred, often due to poor design of the air bag system software, or due to electrical issues with the air bag system.

WHY YOUR AIR BAG DID NOT DEPLOY

There are several reasons why your air bag may not have deployed during a crash.  The first reason is that perhaps your crash is not the type of accident where air bag deployment would be helpful.  For frontal air bags, this includes many, but not all, side impacts, rear impacts and rollovers.  This category also includes minor accidents in which the driver and front passenger (if there was one) did not suffer any significant injuries requiring medical treatment.

The second reason is that there could be a defect that prevented the crash sensors from detecting the crash properly.  Our investigation and analysis of air bag systems in hundreds and hundreds of crashes has revealed numerous causes that fall within this category.  In some cases, the air bag deployment threshold is simply not set appropriately, often due to inadequate testing.  In other cases, a flaw in the software of the air bag control module has caused it to ignore the data from one of the crash sensors.  In still other cases, there are simply too few sensors to properly detect real-world crashes; this often results from overly zealous cost-reduction efforts by car companies that are trying to improve their finances.  In a few cases, quality control efforts have failed to prevent defective sensors or air bag control modules from reaching the public.

2002 Buick Century: Fatal Non-Deployment

The third reason is that there could be a defect that prevented the deployment signal from reaching the air bag modules and deploying them.  Here, the problem usually lies with the electrical components and wiring between the crash sensors, control module and the air bag modules.  The most frequent defect in this category that we see is when the driver air bag fails to deploy, but the passenger air bag does deploy.  In many cases, this is due to a defective clockspring located in the steering column.  Millions of defective clocksprings have been recalled, generally due to poor quality control at either the supplier’s production plant or the car company’s assembly plant.

Airbag Clockspring

Ford Airbag Sensor Cut Wire

The fourth reason is that there could be a defect that prevented the actual air bag modules from deploying correctly.  In a few cases, the crash sensors and air bag control modules have commanded deployment of the air bags, but the air bags failed to respond.  This is almost always due to defects within the air bag modules themselves, usually due to poor quality control.

Although each vehicle and each accident is different, I can help you determine whether the air bags in your car should have deployed in your accident.  As an air bag attorney, as a former air bag engineer for General Motors, and as a court-recognized air bag expert witness, I have over 20 years of experience in analyzing air bag system performance.  If your air bag system is defective and you have a case, I would be honored to pursue justice for you.

Many airbags have straps inside the fabric airbag that are called tethers. These tethers are designed to prevent the airbag from reaching too far toward a driver or passenger and violently slamming them in the face. However, some manufacturers did not install tethers in all of their airbag designs. Although not using tethers can save a company millions of dollars, it can cause significant injuries to its customers. Typical injuries resulting from a lack of tethers include: blindness, eye injury, facial abrasions and other traumatic injuries.  Tethers can prevent many of these injuries.

Tethers also have other advantages. They help position the airbag properly during the deployment sequence so that it does not slam a passenger in the face, and can provide maximum protection during a crash. They also help ensure a more consistent deployment, helping reduce the effects of manufacturing inconsistencies.

Some manufacturers use tethers in many of their driver airbags.

Airbag Tether

Unfortunately, some of these car companies (including Chrysler and Honda/Acura) did not implement tethers until after consumers suffered numerous facial injuries from their initial airbags that did not include tethers. Other manufacturers fail to use tethers in passenger airbags even though even the most basic review of crash testing shows they strike the passenger in the face during deployment and before they achieve their fully inflated shape.  In our airbag lawsuits, we have also uncovered some airbags that have a very poorly designed tether that still allows people to be blinded by the airbag.

A design standard for the industry to limit the risk of eye injuries was published in the 1970s. That standard specified a maximum speed of an airbag if it contacts a passenger in the eyes. Incredibly, some manufacturers still do not conduct testing to measure the speed of their inflating airbag, even when it is clear that the airbag can strike the passenger in the eyes.

Government studies have confirmed the benefits of tethers in laboratory tests, and technical papers published in the industry have proven that tethers reduce eye injuries during accidents where the airbags deploy.

Our testing in this area has documented that some untethered airbags carry a significant risk of causing blindness and eye injuries. In fact, our data reveals that some of passenger airbags deploy at speeds above 300 mph! Can you imagine having an airbag hit you in the eyes at 300 mph? Now you know why tethers should be used inside YOUR airbag.

How can you tell if your airbag has tethers?  Unfortunately, most manufacturers do not tell consumers whether the airbags in their cars are tethered.  Often, people find out their airbag lacked this safety feature only after they were injured by the airbag after it deployed in a wreck.  An experienced airbag lawyer knows what to look for to determine whether tethers were used in your airbag, and whether the tethers worked appropriately.

General Motors recalled more than 12,000 model year 2009 Cadillac CTS cars for a safety defect in its advanced airbag system.  A defect in the software of the Passenger Sensing System can turn off the passenger airbag even though a passenger is sitting in the seat.  This defect, which occurs when the Passenger Sensing System tries to initialize, causes these vehicles to fail to comply with FMVSS 208, the government’s safety standard for occupant crash protection.

Internally, GM first became aware of the problem in July of 2008, and later found four cars with this same defect in their own test fleet.  In November 2008, General Motors notified the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that it was conducting the recall.  The government assigned recall number 08V-582 to this safety defect.

Most people consider the main part of the airbag to be the fabric airbag cushion that comes out during the crash. Although some call it a “pillow”, they are anything except that: they often deploy at speeds of more than 200 mph, and can cause serious personal injuries or even kill you.

Driver airbags are generally pancake-shaped. Their diameter is usually slightly larger than the steering wheel. Passenger airbags are irregularly shaped, and are designed to fit in the area between the instrument panel (dash), windshield, and the passenger. Thus, passenger airbags are much larger than driver airbag, sometimes up to four times as large.

Airbags are generally constructed of a tightly woven fabric, usually nylon or polyester. The fabrics themselves are characterized by various engineering parameters, including weave, weave count, denier and others. These specify the thickness or density of the material, and the tightness of the weave.

One extremely important characteristic of frontal airbags is whether they include tethers to maximize their safety. Tethers are internal straps inside the airbag that help prevent high speed bag slap injuries to a person’s face. Such bag slap injuries often include eye injury and blindness. Some manufacturers failed to include tethers in their airbags, saving themselves millions of dollars, but putting their customers at risk of serious and permanent injuries. Tethers will be explored in detail in another post.

Sometimes the fabric is coated on the inside to reduce the amount of gas that leaks out through the permeable fabric and the seams. This is often true of driver airbags that deploy from the steering wheel and rollover airbags that deploy from the roof. A rollover airbag must stay inflated longer because rollover crashes last much longer than typical head-on collisions, and using a coated airbag helps the airbag stay inflated.

Side airbags come in a variety of sizes. Some side impact airbags are mounted to the seat and deploy between a passenger and the door to protect the chest and pelvis. Better side impact airbags also protect the passenger’s head. This can be accomplished by a combination torso/head bag deploying from the seat or door, or by using a side curtain airbag that deploys downward from the roof and extends along the side of a vehicle. The best curtain airbags are also triggered during rollover crashes, as well as side impacts. Such rollover airbags have been installed in vehicles sold in the United States since the 2002 model year. However, some manufacturers failed to install them until much later, unnecessarily exposing their customers to the risk of significant injuries during a rollover crash.