Automotive: Airbag Deployment – Separating Fact from Fiction
Most people realize and understand that airbags save lives. They come in all modern cars and the only one way you can get a vehicle that doesn’t have them is to purchase a very old car.
According to some estimates, airbags saved an estimated 50K lives over a 50-year period. That’s not a small number. It means that this invention changed the automotive world, and most individuals think they’re a net positive.
Not everyone feels that way about them, though. In this article, we’ll try to separate fact from fiction when it comes to airbags. If you feel at all worried or unsure about them, then hopefully, we can set your mind as ease.
Do Airbags Kill People?
Most people feel fine about airbags and seldom give them a second thought. That makes sense, since you don’t usually see them. Car manufacturers install them in such a way that they’ll only appear if they deploy, unless you open up the dashboard using tools to look for them.
If someone doesn’t like or trust them, that probably means they’ve heard that they can injure or kill you. They might see such theories or ideas on conspiracy theory message boards.
In reality, airbags have killed people before. However, some extremely large caveats go along with that statement.
Early airbags didn’t have the same engineering that modern ones do. Decades ago, when car manufacturers first started adding them to their vehicles, they still had some kinks to work out.
Some early airbags killed or injured people, but it didn’t happen often. When it did, you could usually point to some of the same contributing factors.
In What Circumstances Might an Airbag Kill Someone?
Decades ago, when airbags first started appearing in cars, most times, if one killed or injured someone, that was a child or an infant. If a driver had a relatively young child or an infant in the front seat, and they got in an accident, then the airbag might deploy. If that happened, then it might strike the young passenger sitting in that seat.
While tragic, most car manufacturers even in those early days of the airbag warned that they might harm a child if an adult decided to place a youngster in the front seat next to them. They warned that young children should instead sit in a specially designed car seat in the vehicle’s back seat.
The number of adults who airbags killed back then probably wasn’t more than a handful spread out over a period of years. Much like seatbelts, which some drivers didn’t like when they first appeared, some people simply didn’t trust the new technology.
However, as time passed, the incidents of airbags killing or injuring adult passengers became even rarer. That’s why any paranoia about airbags makes little sense, especially in modern times when engineers have put even more work into perfecting their functionality.
Do They Ever Deploy in Error?
Yes, it is still possible that an airbag might deploy in error and injure an adult passenger. If that happens, then the manufacturer probably made it incorrectly or the car company installed it improperly. However, the likelihood that such an event might occur should not give you any reason for undue concern.
That’s because car brands and airbag manufacturing companies test their products so extensively now. It makes sense that they do so, since they don’t want anyone to sue them. An airbag that deploys at the wrong moment and either injures or kills someone could cost the manufacturer or the car brand millions, and that’s obviously something these companies want to avoid.
Such lawsuits don’t just cost the car company or airbag manufacturer money. They also cost them goodwill with the public. That’s why such rigorous testing policies exist before any car or airbag makes it to market where the public can get their hands on it.
In short, if you want to worry about something while you’re driving, you should probably concern yourself more with encountering a drunk driver than with the airbag suddenly deploying and injuring you. If you keep your young children safely in the back seat and away from the airbag, you can feel that you’re doing your due diligence. You’re behaving exactly as the car company and airbag manufacturer want.
Airbags save many more lives every year than they endanger. That should be your main takeaway when you think about this kind of modern car technology.