Air Bags did not open on impact

MOBILVETTA

HI Just crashed car on ice last week and air bags did not deploy. Was not going too fast but fast enough to do a lot of damage. Front bumper and inner bar, bonnet and drivers wing all smashed. Car was a 99 renault megan. Cant understand why they did not open

Mr.Boots

Probably just as well (unless you were injured which i asume you wernt)
they cost a fortune to replace.
maybe you wernt going fast enough.

MOBILVETTA

Mr.Boots wrote: »

Probably just as well (unless you were injured which i asume you wernt)
they cost a fortune to replace.
maybe you wernt going fast enough.

pride only

SV

Airbags will only deploy if the car judges that without them, you would have died(or been seriously injured).

high heels

Airbags can do more damage than good.. Look at the Donegal crash last year where the 7 died. The airbag went off on a small crash and then the driver was blinded and had a head on smack..

kirving

They're set off by explosives, so it's not like its a soft cushion that will slow you down gently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55B_p-hOkE

high heels wrote: »

Airbags can do more damage than good.. Look at the Donegal crash last year where the 7 died. The airbag went off on a small crash and then the driver was blinded and had a head on smack..

Could be the case yes, but had ther only been 5 in the car, and the all had a seatbelt, it would have been a much better outcome.

challengemaster

high heels wrote: »

Airbags can do more damage than good.. Look at the Donegal crash last year where the 7 died. The airbag went off on a small crash and then the driver was blinded and had a head on smack..

Eh...It took the bloody wheel off of another car. It wasn't a small crash in any way. That takes some amount of force.

Also unless you know something that everyone else doesn't, I don't think you can be saying with certainty exactly what happened.

Alanstrainor

high heels wrote: »

Airbags can do more damage than good.. Look at the Donegal crash last year where the 7 died. The airbag went off on a small crash and then the driver was blinded and had a head on smack..

challengemaster wrote: »

Also unless you know something that everyone else doesn't, I don't think you can be saying with certainty exactly what happened.

+1 on exactly that.

Unless you have specific evidence to back up statements like that, i'd prefer if they were left out completely.

Owen

Airbags will only deploy if absolutely necessary, they don't pop out in every crash, even ones which look bad.

Veloce

I've been a front seat passenger in which the airbags did deploy at a ~80km/h impact. The bang from the airbag against your face is damn sore.

cooltown

high heels wrote: »

Airbags can do more damage than good.. Look at the Donegal crash last year where the 7 died. The airbag went off on a small crash and then the driver was blinded and had a head on smack..

The Passat in that crash has only five seats and five seat belts. So the car is only built for fiveh. Airbags are more dangerous when seat belt is not worn with them. I have heard that 4 people in the Donegal crash were thrown out of the vehicle on impact. So the airbags were prob not to blame.

mydearwatson

MOBILVETTA wrote: »

HI Just crashed car on ice last week and air bags did not deploy. Was not going too fast but fast enough to do a lot of damage. Front bumper and inner bar, bonnet and drivers wing all smashed. Car was a 99 renault megan. Cant understand why they did not open

Sorry to hear about your accident.

Seeing as you weren't injured, it's definitely a good thing that they didn't deploy. Imagine if you were in a similar accident, hit a wall or whatever and the airbags deployed - but if, seconds later, your car went on to hit another fast-moving vehicle head-on? Once the airbags have already been deployed, they're absolutely no good to you in the second collision. This is one reason that they're designed only to deploy when the impact is so bad that you'd be dead/seriously injured without them. Since you were lucky enough to escape without injury, it's a good thing that they didn't deploy unnecessarily.

Then of course there's the expense of replacing them - in a lot of cases, it's nearly cheaper to write off the car, especially considering there's going to be other damage done to it. And then there's the fact that they are supposedly really, really painful, and have been known to cause other injuries (I've heared of people getting broken noses, etc, from them.)

So it's definitely a good thing that they didn't deploy, and if I were you I wouldn't be particularly worried that it means they're faulty or anything like that.

-Chris-

Alanstrainor wrote: »

Unless you have specific evidence to back up statements like that, i'd prefer if they were left out completely.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

cooltown wrote: »

The Passat in that crash has only five seats and five seat belts. So the car is only built for fiveh. Airbags are more dangerous when seat belt is not worn with them. I have heard that 4 people in the Donegal crash were thrown out of the vehicle on impact. So the airbags were prob not to blame.

Seriously?



Can we leave the Donegal crash out of it please?

Johnnio13

The speed of the deceleration of the car vs the speed the car is travelling is what triggers the airbag.
So you were travelling fast enough for them to deploy.

leeroybrown

Airbags are designed to go off when the force of an impact is severe enough to put the passengers at a level of risk where they're required. In lower speed impacts or impacts where the force is coming from the wrong angle they won't deploy as the cars other safety systems should be more than enough.

You have to remember that modern cars are designed to take a lot of exterior damage to protect the occupants. I've been in one crash that destroyed the front end, bent the chassis and wrote off the car without the airbags deploying - there was no need for them. The cd player didn't even skip.

coylemj

Veloce wrote: »

The bang from the airbag against your face is damn sore.

Not half as sore as the windscreen smashing your face flat!

mydearwatson

coylemj wrote: »

Not half as sore as the windscreen smashing your face flat!

Of course, but the point is that, in this case, the driver didn't hit the windscreen, and was lucky enough to escape without injury.

Therefore the airbag deploying would have been of no benefit to him, any may in fact have ended up causing injury to him.

mathepac

MOBILVETTA wrote: »

... Cant understand why they did not open

As stated above, sensors in the car govern the deployment of the air-bags as well as the decisions about which ones and which if any seatbelt pre-tensioners to activate.

If the impact was off-centre, as seems to be implied by the destruction of the drivers-side wing, then the air-bags in the steering wheel and over the glove-box will more than likely not deploy.

Based on the year make and model of the car, I believe it is unlikey it was fitted with curtain or side air-bags some of which might have deployed in an off-centre impact.

If you have concerns about the functioning of the air-bags and if the car will go back on the road, maybe you need to have an accident assessor look at it.

Just to state again, not all air-bags fitted to a car will deploy in all accidents - assuming everything is working as designed and not disabled, the sensors dictate what happens

Nissan doctor

Asuming there was no fault with the airbags, as would have been indicated by the srs light being on permenantly, then regardless of the damage, the impact simply wasn't enough to set them off.

The fact that you weren't injured means that the crash wasn't that severe..in the big picture of road accidents of course.