You trust that your car’s safety measures will function as intended if and when they’re needed. Perhaps not in the case of airbags. By 2021, it was anticipated that 14 million vehicles in the United States alone would be equipped with defective Takata airbags. Numerous manufacturers, including Honda, Toyota, Ford, and Nissan, have incorporated this safety feature into their automobiles. As of 2015, Takata had initiated a massive recall of roughly 34 million impacted vehicles, yet many are still on the road.
This is only one of many potential ways an airbag could fail its user(s). Other than failing to deploy when needed, deploying too slowly, or not deploying at all, airbags are a common source of accidents.
The NHTSA estimates that airbags have saved over 50,500 lives. Where can you go if your airbag stops working, though? Who’s to blame if your airbag didn’t go off? Learn more!
Precautionary Deployment of Airbags
All passenger vehicles produced after 1998 come equipped with standard airbags. Safety features like these have been mandatory in larger cars like vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs since 1998. This ensures that all modern cars have front airbags, and many have side airbags. However, these safeguards cannot always ensure passenger safety in the event of an accident.
When used in conjunction with a seatbelt, airbags become much safer.
Accident victims might take precautions to avoid harm from airbags. Always wearing a seatbelt is the first and most crucial step you can take to protect yourself when traveling.
Airbags should be used in conjunction with other safety features, such as seatbelts, to be the most effective. In the event of a collision, airbags will deploy regardless of whether or not the driver and passengers are wearing seatbelts.
Several injuries can occur if you aren’t wearing a seatbelt and an airbag goes off:
- A person inside the car can still be thrown out of it.
- As the airbag deploys, the occupants will be pushed forward into its path.
- There will be no protection for passengers in the event of a collision with another passenger or any other part of the vehicle.
The airbags in my car failed to go off; who is to blame?
The annual number of lives saved by properly functioning airbags is in the thousands. To make matters worse, airbags don’t always deploy properly. If an automobile’s airbags don’t deploy properly, they are useless in protecting passengers from harm. You have a much higher chance of suffering serious injuries if they go off after the fact.
