Another vehicle pulled out of a side street directly into the path of our client’s 2005 Ford Taurus. The resulting accident caused the driver air bag in the Taurus to deploy, inducing significant injuries to the neck, face and eye, including facial bone fractures, nasal fractures, cervical spine injuries, diplopia, and other facial trauma.

According to the data from the black box (Restraints Control Module), the driver seat belt was buckled, but there was a fault within the driver seat belt pretensioner at the time of the collision. Our investigation also revealed a concern regarding whether the air bag should have deployed at all.  Furthermore, the evidence indicated that the driver air bag deployed at a higher force level than it should have, and that the actual deployment time was later than it should have been.

Our client was the driver of a 2000 Ford Focus that was hit on the passenger side by a car trying to cut across several lanes of traffic to make a left turn.  Even though the frontal airbags are not designed to deploy in side impacts, his airbag deployed when it shouldn’t have, hit him in the eyes, and blinded him.

The deeper we dug into the Ford Focus airbag design and development process, the more problems we found.  For example, even though Ford told the government that most of its airbags are designed not to deploy below 8 mph in barrier crash tests, the 2000 and 2001 Ford Focus were different: they can deploy even in certain accidents at 6 and 1/2 mph.  This is lower than virtually all other Ford airbag systems from the prior decade.  Incredibly, Ford admitted that it didn’t even know the actual air bag non-deployment threshold when it started selling these cars to its customers!  They later changed the airbag system design to increase the threshold beginning in 2002, but they never recalled the 2000 and 2001 Ford Focus cars to fix this problem.

Additionally, the driver airbag itself lacked internal “tethers”.  Tethers are straps inside the airbag that prevent it from deploying as far toward the driver.  This reduces the risk of injury from the deploying airbag.  In this Ford Focus, however, Ford decided to instead use sewing thread to stitch together parts of the airbag, as a substitute for the tether straps.  Simply put, such stitching is certainly cheaper than tethers, but it doesn’t work nearly as well in reducing airbag injuries.  They certainly didn’t prevent our client from being blinded in one eye.

I think everyone would agree that any reasonable company should always put safety ahead of profits.