Car Recall Service Advice: How Should an Airbag Work?

As your local car recall service specialists, we often deal with airbag issues on recently released cars. Every modern car needs airbags, it’s a legal requirement, and it’s rare to find a car on our roads that aren’t fitted with a set of airbags. Here in Australia, airbags are classified as supplementary safety equipment. ANCAP has stated that around 45% of fatal car crashes only involve a single vehicle, and the structure and safety system provides the maximum amount of protection. Let’s take a closer look at how airbags should work in your car.

The Safety Standards

The Australian Design Rules (ADR) have a clear mandate; cars sold here must meet the minimum safety standards for the head, chest, and upper leg injuries. If a car sold here doesn’t have airbags, it must have some other engineering in place to meet that need. The ADR testing is rigorous, self-tensioning seat belts are a proven     technology, but many of us have become comfortable with multiple airbags in our cars to offer additional protection. The introduction of those early front airbags met a great deal of resistance at the time, but now people are happy to see airbags fitted to offer a wider range of protection is the event of a serious vehicular collision.

Airbags and Seatbelts

The research clearly shows that airbags used together with seatbelts are the safest way to reduce the risk of a serious injuring during a car accident. A study conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre in 2012 showed that side torso and curtain airbags reduced the incidence of severe injuries and fatalities in a side impact crash by around 60%. Other research from the USA shows that head and curtain airbags offer protection and mitigate some of the size differences in passengers. So, given this information, it’s only natural to get a car with the largest number and variation of airbags to stay safe on the road. Actually, there are reasons to reject this kind of thinking, and we will explore this in more detail below.

Airbag Deployment

A visit to any local car repair shops will quickly demonstrate the amount of damage that can occur in a vehicular collision. However, the deployment of an airbag isn’t guaranteed under certain circumstances. Many people are unaware that their airbags will not deploy in a car rollover unless a rollover sensor is installed. In fact, the sensor technology is better than ever, and yet there are still occasions when the airbags will not be triggered for deployment. As an example: in a rear-end crash, your car could be shunted forward into another car, but your sensors might only detect the rear impact, and the frontal airbags may not deploy. As our airbag sensors become more advanced this will become less of a problem, but these types of scenarios can occur, and this is why we cannot rely on airbags alone to keep us safe in a car crash.

If you’re looking for the best “car repair near me” get in touch with AHG for expert help and advice.