Air Bag Defects
Airbag systems are designed to reduce driver and passenger injuries in a motor vehicle collision, particularly collisions at high speeds. To reduce injuries, airbags are designed to absorb some of the impact of a crash and act as a buffer between the vehicle occupant and the vehicle’s dashboard and windshield. When properly designed, air bags can be useful safety devices. Unfortunately, many air bag systems were poorly designed, resulting in numerous known air bag defects which, in turn, have resulted in thousands of serious air bag injuries.
An airbag may deploy incorrectly or malfunction because of a defect in its design, which can result in serious injury for vehicle occupants in a collision, regardless of speed. A defective airbag might deploy at the wrong time – either too quickly or too slowly – resulting in severe head trauma. A defective airbag might explode resulting in painful skin abrasions and burns, hearing damage, head injury, eye damage, broken bones, suffocation, and even brain damage. A defective airbag may deploy but fail to deflate resulting in suffocation. If a defective airbag fails to deploy at all, it can cause serious injury or death due to an impact with the windshield.
Defectively designed air bags are known to cause brain hemorrhages, burst hearts, severed brain stems, spinal injury, broken necks, blindings, TMJ syndrome, facial bone fractures, upper extremity injuries and disfigurement. These injuries have killed and paralyzed unsuspecting adults and children in collisions in which no one would have been injured if the air bag didn’t deploy.
Some Other Known Air Bag Defects:
• Air Bags Without Tethers
• Inferior Algorithims
• Venting and Folding Defect
• Failure to Incorporate Technology
• Use of Cheap Sensors