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.
