The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-

Re: air bags

Wilt Nelson ([email protected])
Sun, 17 May 1998 13:42:00 -0400 (EDT)

It is not unusual for a minor or low injury threshold crash to be expensive to repair on newer cars. Just the bumper,grille and perhaps a fender or radiator could total well over $3K. However, if the sensor threshold for the air bag is not reached the system won't deploy. A 12 mph threshold is where minor injury begins. This could be as much as a fx arm, facial injuries, bruises, etc. A 12 mph threshold is approx. equivalent to hitting a parked car of the same mass at 24 mph.
Were you injured? What specific injuries, if any? The bag deploys at a speed of up to 200 mph and has enough energy to move anything in front of it that is not fixed. If your chest is against it (Out of the normal seated position) your sternum will be mashed against your backbone. If your head is up against it the head may end up separated from your body. BThese are extremes but they have occurred. Believe me, you may be lucky it didn't deploy. Save your self the cost of hiring an attorney to hear the same thing in court by checking out what severity of crash you had.
Wilt
Wilt Nelson
[email protected]

NOTE: You are reading in an archived session of ARnews. It is possible that this topic is still being discussed. To see if this topic is still active, or of there were any more recent posts on this topic, check later archives of ARnews.

If there is no current post, and you would like to add to this topic, link to the Current ARnews Discussion and begin a new thread. Be sure that if you are starting a new post that the thread title does not contain the abbreviation RE: Placing RE: at the beginning of a new post will confuse Hypermail and prevent others from answering your post in the future.

For example, to continue this discussion look for a thread titled

air bags

If this thread does not exist in the current archive, you can begin another one by using that title.