Austin Airbag Malfunction Attorney

Being in a car accident is scary, no matter how many safety features your vehicle has. While technological advances continue to save lives on the roads, what happens when the equipment you have come to rely on to reduce your risk of injury fails you?

Since the 1990s, airbags have been required safety features in all passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States.

This was the first major automobile safety legislation since seatbelts were made mandatory in the 1960s. Since then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates more than 50,457 lives have been saved by frontal airbags. Unfortunately, when a car accident involves defective airbags, it can lead to unnecessarily severe injuries and even death.

Understanding the causes of malfunctioning airbags starts with understanding a little bit about how airbags work, starting with their main parts:

• Airbag inflator
• Impact sensors
• SRS airbag module
• Indicator lamp
• Clock spring
• Airbag
• Wiring harness

Each of these seven parts plays a crucial role in slowing the amount of dangerous forward motion during impact, and properly functioning airbags do this very quickly and very effectively. However, each of these components and the role they play in keeping you and your loved ones safer is also a potential product liability lawsuit rooted in negligence.

Some common airbag defects are rooted in negligent manufacturing, and some are outright egregious:

• ​​Defective inflators
• Defective impact sensors
• Faulty ON/OFF sensor
• Manufacturing defects
• Faulty designs
• Counterfeit after-market replacements
• Corrosion
• Electrical system problems
• Premature inflation

An airbag that malfunctions can explode, fail to inflate, inflate at the wrong time, or even inflate with too much force. A damaged airbag can also inflate during a low-speed car accident, causing injuries that likely would not have happened otherwise.

Sometimes, these defects are widespread, resulting in a recall. Unfortunately, attempts to reach people who are driving potentially dangerous vehicles because of necessary recalls often go unanswered. Sometimes, this is because cars are sold or being used by family members or friends other than the registered owners.

Sometimes, this is because the right person gets the memo but ignores the message, which often looks similar to often-unwanted car warranty solicitations.

Still, anyone can check whether their vehicle — or one driven by someone they love — has an outstanding recall notice. To do so, follow these three steps:

1. Check for recalls using your vehicle identification number (VIN).
2. Call your local dealer and schedule the free repair.
3. Sign up for Recall Alerts to receive notice of any future recall that affects your vehicle.

Along with defects, counterfeit airbags are a less common but no less dangerous safety concern. According to the NHTSA, counterfeit airbags have been shown to consistently malfunction, and these fake safety systems can fail in a variety of different ways.

When it comes to airbag malfunctions, there is little to compare to the devastation caused by the Takata Corporation, a multinational corporation at the heart of the modern airbag crisis. As of April 2022, the largest automotive recall in history had been underway for seven years, resulting in staggering consequences that are still ongoing:

• More than 17 deaths and 200 injuries in the U.S. alone
• 43,171,410 million faulty airbags repaired
• 12,216,832 defective, unrepaired airbags on the road

The Takata recall is an example of corporate bad behavior that has cost billions of dollars in property and medical expenses as well as the lives of those who have been injured or killed. This massive failure, which has resulted in criminal indictments, bankruptcy filings, and countless attempts to hide from responsibility, affects automobiles made by 19 different car manufacturers over more than a decade.

A crash analysis report from a March 2018 accident indicates that ruptures of the driver’s frontal airbag inflator, made by Takata, resulted in a 16-year-old driver being injured by the metal fragments that erupted from the defective airbag when it deployed. The teen driver died from his accident injuries, and numerous pieces of metal fragments from the airbag system were later discovered by the medical examiner. Even when collisions are not fatal, injuries are not uncommon when it comes to airbags.

A report from a global medical journal looked at airbag-related injuries in the UK and the United States, and it landed on two distinct conclusions:

• Properly working airbags reduce death.
• Airbags increase the number of injuries in a collision.

In their report, the doctors writing for the Emergency Medicine Journal presented their findings that there are some common injuries attributed to airbag deployment, ranging from minor to fatal:

• Facial trauma
• Jaw injuries
• Decapitation
• Cervical spine fractures
• Soft tissue injuries
• Eye injuries
• Rib fractures
• Aortic transection
• Heart valve injury
• Cardiac rupture
• Shoulder injuries
• Premature labor/uterine rupture
• Burns

In some cases, airbags simply may not deploy at all when they are supposed to, resulting in devastating consequences to riders. No matter where they are positioned in the vehicle, airbags’ effectiveness relies on a complex mechanical system working at just the right time, down to fractions of a second. If an airbag deploys even half a second too early or too late, it can change the outcome entirely.

Beginning in 2004, airbags evolved, relying on even more advanced algorithms to operate the airbag system. According to the Association for the Advancement of Automobile Medicine, these advanced occupant restraint systems may be called “smart airbags.” These systems are intended to be adaptable when it comes to their deployment strategies depending on a number of factors, including:

• Occupant belt status
• Occupant seating position
• Crash severity

In some cases, the change in velocity is what determines whether the airbag will deploy at the right time or even at all. These systems may trigger the frontal airbags at different times, and even in stages, in an attempt to optimize safety performance. Airbag sensors that are responsive to a measure of the Delta-V, or the change in trajectory — for example, a vehicle that was going is now stopping — may malfunction, resulting in injury.

When the system deploys in the wrong way for the situation, additional injuries can result. When any part of an airbag system works improperly — or simply fails to work at all — there may be grounds for a defective airbag lawsuit.

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