Advice please re query airbag failure.

photome

nobbysn*ts wrote: »

I sit a few inches away from mine normally. Unless I drive from the back, it's very difficult not to be far away.

Why do you only sit a few inches from the steering wheel

nobbysn*ts

photome wrote: »

Why do you only sit a few inches from the steering wheel

The car's only 204 inches bumper to bumper.

Paradigm

nobbysn*ts wrote: »

The car's only 204 inches bumper to bumper.

17 feet then, 5.6 yds. I guess it's how you define "a few inches"....

Fruity1

facade wrote: »

The seatbelt pretensioner is supposed to go off and snatch you away from the airbag before it deploys if you are too close to it, or pull you back into the seat if not.

Did the pretensioners go off? (Not sure how to tell if they are built into the reels, but if they are in the stalk with the latch it should be easy enough to see.)

You need someone to examine the car to see if the airbags should have triggered, maybe possible to interrogate the cars ecu to find out if there were any faults in the system, or even whether there was a trigger event.

A fractured sternum is quite common, and can be serious


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sternal_fracture

The seat belt had as my bruising demonstrates done some work. As for pretensioners I'm sorry I have no idea. I had considered that it would be quite difficult to argue. But being as people tell me that theirs have gone off by catching a gate post I'd expected with half of the front of an estate car caved in one would have gone off. Thank you all for your constructive replies.

cootuk

Some people say the driver front airbag should be replaced with a big metal spike, just to get people thinking about the effects of crashing.

Mankysteve

I presume you don't have the car but to tell if the the pretensioner there usually a tag of some description comes up it also scrunch up if that makes sense

Fruity1

Mankysteve wrote: »

I presume you don't have the car but to tell if the the pretensioner there usually a tag of some description comes up it also scrunch up if that makes sense

The car is at a friends haulage yard and I am not currently well enough to drive to go and check. I'm not aware of anything that changed on the seat belt buckles or at the top where it comes out of. Someone else released my seat belt to get me out.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

Seat belts and air bags are not designed to leave you injury free, they are designed to mitigate against very serious injuries.

If you left the road at 35mph and were braking (together with ripping off wheels and other stuff when mounting a kerb) then the impact may have been at less than the speed that air bags are designed to go off.

Air bags will only deploy when the accident is serious enough that you will expect otherwise to get very serious injuries. The explosion can cause hearing loss, you can get burns off the bag running across your arms as it deploys.

A fractured sternum is not a serious injury in the grand scheme of things (uncomfortable, but it isn't going to be anything you will not recover 100% from) and it may well be that if the bag had deployed you could have had an alternative set of injuries. As you didn't hit the windscreen, and apparently not even the steering wheel, it may well be that the force necessary for bag deployment was not achieved.

I suspect if you tried to go to court over that, you would be arrayed against a bunch of the manufacturer's experts. You might get something on the basis that it is cheaper than going to court, but I suspect that their reaction will be - broken sternum, that's a survivable injury, the safety systems obviously did their job.

topdaddy_2

nobbysn*ts wrote: »

If you're in it for glory, that's for you. I'm just posting the correct advice for the op.

Well thats questionable.

nobbysn*ts

IanMSpencer wrote: »

Seat belts and air bags are not designed to leave you injury free, they are designed to mitigate against very serious injuries.

If you left the road at 35mph and were braking (together with ripping off wheels and other stuff when mounting a kerb) then the impact may have been at less than the speed that air bags are designed to go off.

Air bags will only deploy when the accident is serious enough that you will expect otherwise to get very serious injuries. The explosion can cause hearing loss, you can get burns off the bag running across your arms as it deploys.

A fractured sternum is not a serious injury in the grand scheme of things (uncomfortable, but it isn't going to be anything you will not recover 100% from) and it may well be that if the bag had deployed you could have had an alternative set of injuries. As you didn't hit the windscreen, and apparently not even the steering wheel, it may well be that the force necessary for bag deployment was not achieved.

I suspect if you tried to go to court over that, you would be arrayed against a bunch of the manufacturer's experts. You might get something on the basis that it is cheaper than going to court, but I suspect that their reaction will be - broken sternum, that's a survivable injury, the safety systems obviously did their job.

No, it's serious enough. It's one of the injuries air bags are designed to avoid, so if the op has an accident that broke the sternum, it failed.