If you have been in an automobile accident, and you realized that your car’s airbag did not deploy at the time of the collision, then you might think that you should contact an injury lawyer in Burlington. You might believe that you have grounds for bringing a lawsuit against the company that manufactured the apparently defective piece of safety equipment. Yet, can you provide proof of the bag’s inability to function properly?
Do you really know how airbags have been assembled and how each of them is meant to respond to a given impact? Do you think that every type of accident should trigger an airbag’s deployment? If that is what you believe, then you need to learn more about each airbag’s features.
The components that allow the airbag to work properly
Each deflated bag that might one day function as a vital piece of safety equipment contains a control module. The ACM (Airbag Control Module) triggers the bag’s inflation. Yet it has less than 100 milliseconds in which to determine whether or not a given bag should be inflated. Not every accident has that small 100 millisecond window.
The circumstances that relate to some collisions prevent the appearance of that 100 millisecond time frame. In the absence of that time frame, the expected deployment does not take place. In other words, the non-deployment should not be viewed as a sign of the bag’s defective nature. Instead, it reflects the speed at which the damaged vehicle collided with another vehicle, or with an unmovable object.
If a slow moving automobile collides with another vehicle neither of the vehicles will slow to a great extent. As a result, the ACM will not detect a noticeable deceleration. In the absence of a more rapid rate of deceleration, the ACM finds no reason to trigger the bag’s deployment. That is one example of a time when non-deployment does not signal the presence of a defect.
By the same token, if an automobile hits a pole or a tree, there will be lots of metal-crushing, but not a great deal of deceleration. Consequently, that situation ought to be classed with the others that have failed to trigger a bag’s deployment. The unhappy owner of the crushed vehicle would not have a reason for bringing a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the car’s airbags.
The bag’s location indicates its function
As would be expected, a side airbag should deploy whenever it has noted the force of a side impact. Still, the force of such an impact exceeds measurably the force on the side of a car that has rolled over. Hence, the airbags in a car’s sides should not be expected to deploy at the time of a rollover. Consequently, it would not make much sense to investigate further the events associated with the rollover, unless that same investigation has been requested by the at-fault driver.
