Usually, a car accident takes place because one or more drivers were careless and neglectful in some respect. Yet some accidents occur as the result of poor road conditions. Others result from the presence of a malfunctioning part in one of the involved vehicles.
Introduction of air bags has added to the number of parts that can malfunction. What actions can an insured driver take, if a malfunctioning air bag caused those in the impacted vehicle to suffer unnecessarily severe injuries?
The ways that an air bag could malfunction
It could fail to deploy, so that the occupants in the front seat did not enjoy a sufficient level of protection. It could overinflate, so that the person hit by the inflating bag received too great an impact. It could under inflate, so that the amount of air in the deployed part proved unequal to the task of protecting a specific occupant in the affected vehicle. It could deploy at the wrong time, so that it would become a dangerous distraction or obstruction, rather than a protective device.
Would the driver have the right to sue the maker of the defective air bag?
If the driver or one of the passengers had been injured, then the driver could pursue a defective product claim. Still, it would become necessary to identify the cause of the defect. You can file a claim with the assistance of a Personal Injury Lawyer in Mississauga.
What could be the possible causes for the presence of a defect in an air bag?
It could be that it was not designed properly. Maybe it lacked a well-designed control mechanism. The control mechanism is supposed to detect the force of any impact on the vehicle that had been fitted with air bags. An error in design normally affects more than one of the manufactured items. Depending on the serious nature of the design flaw, multiple drivers could be affected. In that case, the manufacturer would probably need to issue a recall of the affected vehicles.
Maybe someone working in the manufacturing plant had made a mistake. For instance, it could be that some element of the signaling system did not get constructed correctly. A quality control department is supposed to identify such errors, but there are times when it misses one of them.
Perhaps the vehicle with the air bags did not have all of the necessary warning signs. There are restrictions on the size of the occupant in the seat where the bag’s deployment could take place, in the event of an accident. That occupant should be an adult. If someone had failed to post notice of that restriction, and if a child got injured, following a bag’s deployment, a marketer or a retailer might be held liable for the child’s injury.
