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Use your head while working around airbags, and as you’re crawling about a vehicle’s interior completing your assigned repair tasks, be mindful of where your head is positioned lest an accidental deployment occur.
By all accounts, you’ve got to know what you’re doing when dealing with these increasingly sophisticated systems.
And whether riding or repairing, “you want to put some distance between yourself and the airbag,” says Rae Tyson, spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
“Auto repair facility people need to know how to disconnect the airbag systems prior to working on the vehicle to prevent any inadvertent deployments,” says Douglas Campbell, president of the Automotive Occupant Restraints Council (AORC).
Official statistics on accidental airbag deployments – as well as failures-to-deploy in serious crashes – appear to fall into the “black hole for data” described by Jim Quiggle at the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. It apparently happens often enough to suggest caution for collision specialists and tow truck drivers who could find themselves in harm’s way if the system is compromised by faulty or non-existent repairs or an undetected defect originating from the assembly line.
“I am unaware of any statistics on this topic, as the reliability of airbag systems installed by the vehicle makers has proven to be very reliable and has not been an issue,” Campbell says. “If such an issue existed, the NHTSA would have ordered a recall of the suspect parts and eliminated them from the field.”
The AORC was founded in 1965 as the American Seat Belt Council to assist in establishing uniform production and quality standards for seat belts. The name was changed to the Automotive Occupant Restraints Council in 1988 to better represent its diverse international membership, which includes nearly 90 percent of manufacturers and suppliers of airbags, airbag components and seat belts as well as automotive seating and interior safety components. The field itself dates back to 1923, when Barney Oldfield’s racing team enlisted the Irvin Air Chute Co. to create a “safety harness” for his historic Indianapolis 500 entry.
Hands-on contact
Nowadays, though, with as many as 12 airbags in a single vehicle being propelled from canisters emitting up to 10,000 pounds per square inch of inflationary energy, obtaining the appropriate, certified, education has become a critical requirement among collision repair specialists.
“Any body shop that intends to work with airbags in any capacity should make sure that all the people who have any hands-on contact with the airbag system get the proper training,” says Quiggle at the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud.
Accidental deployment is an especially acute concern of emergency personnel working under less-than-desirable conditions at the site of a wreck.
“The greatest risk that a responder faces at the accident scene is an accidental airbag deployment,” says industry trainer Todd Hoffman, executive director of Scene of the Accident Inc. “So far the injuries to first responders have been minor, but it is like playing Russian roulette – sooner or later a fatality is going to happen.
“The repairer faces as much, if not more, risk than the responder due to the increased length of time they are inside the vehicle,” Hoffman says. “I am getting a lot of reports from collision repair shops talking about ‘near misses’ from when an airbag accidentally deploys during inspection and repair. Things are going to get worse because technicians are not being properly trained in airbag accident prevention.”
Hoffman was the recipient of ABRN’s Leadership Award in 2006. A noted authority on industry safety and technical expertise, Hoffman has taught most of the courses offered by I-CAR, which has recognized him with its Chairman’s Award and Instructor of the Year honors. The National Auto Body Council presented him with its National Pride Award.
“The statistics on accidental deployment are a lot like the stats on ‘lives saved by the airbag.’ There is no way of telling if the life was really saved by the airbag because no one can predict the results of the crash if the airbag did not deploy,” Hoffman says. “As for accidental deployments at the accident scene after the crash, there have been thousands. In every class that I conduct I purposely cause an accidental deployment in a car to show just how quick and easy it can happen.
“The greatest risk to responders used to be the capacitor or energy reserve module, which held an electrical charge for as long as 15 minutes after the battery was disconnected. Today the major concern is a second battery or alternative power supply such as an iPod or cell phone or navigational system plugged into the dash,” Hoffman continues.
“Even though the battery is disconnected, there is still enough power back-feeding into the system to accidentally deploy an airbag. Another concern is the tremendous amount of static charge that is in the air when a Life Flight helicopter hovers overhead or lands close by.”
Emergency workers run risks when using the Jaws of Life to cut into a vehicle because “automakers are not marking the location of the airbag inflators,” creating a danger of accidentally slicing into it and setting off the powerful charge, according to Hoffman.
The electrical charges found in hybrids have presented yet another issue, says industry trainer Craig Van Batenburg, CEO at the Automotive Career Development Center. OEMs have thus implemented systems that “close down the high voltage when the airbags deploy to keep everyone safe. First responders appreciate that.”
Probing the ‘black hole’
For vehicle occupants, a failed airbag deployment can lead to a fatal outcome.
“There is really no way to tell if the airbag will deploy short of crashing the car,” says Hoffman. “The earlier model the car, the more likely there could be a failure. With the newer on-board computers, the SRS system is being constantly monitored and the light will come on if any fault is detected. I don’t think that there is a shelf life for airbags anymore. Since they are hermetically sealed, there is little chance of failure even many years down the road,” he adds.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is conducting an analysis of the “rare cases” where airbags don’t deploy; results are not yet available. “IIHS has done research on airbags, but it mostly deals with how airbags are reducing the risk to people in crashes,” says spokesman Russ Rader. “The only information we have on airbag reliability over time is a test we conducted in the early 1990s of an airbag-equipped GM car from the early 1970s. The frontal airbag in the then-20 year-old car worked perfectly in a crash test.”
“The problem with airbag failure data is that the vehicle occupants never seem to tell the truth,” Hoffman asserts. “They will always say that they were wearing their seatbelt or that they were sitting properly in their seat. Since there are a number if things that can cause an airbag not to deploy – such as leaning against the door or leaning forward getting something out of the glove box – there is no way of telling if the system worked as engineered or suffered a fault. I can say that I have looked at thousands of vehicles and have never found one that I could not explain why the airbags did or did not deploy. A few were vehicle recalls not taken care of, but the rest worked as designed.”
A NHTSA review of 1,446 fatal accidents from 2001 and 2006 involving failed airbag deployment found that 182 of them had non-functional airbags; there were 255 instances of missing airbags that had not been repaired following a previous wreck.
“We don’t know if the airbag would have made a difference” in the outcome, says Tyson, the NHTSA spokesman.
As for accidental deployments, “that’s a question I can’t answer,” he reports. “We do not routinely document them. I can’t give you numbers on how frequently it happens. Our primary issue is whether there is a defect” in the system that would require a manufacturer recall.
Another NHTSA official, not authorized to speak publicly on the topic, points out that the accumulated information is only as good as the reporting officers at the scene: A multi-vehicle pileup during a rush-hour blizzard where the cars are pushed to the edge of the highway is going to garner less detail than a single incident on an otherwise quiet summer night.
Tyson stresses that as airbag systems become more sophisticated the risks of either accidental deployment or non-deployment are sharply reduced. Sensors can detect if a child or small-statured adult is in the seat. More people are using seatbelts, and more parents are properly securing safety-seated youngsters in the back seat rather than the front. “We have not had many of those over the past few years.”
Hoffman recounts a tragic event in Baton Rouge, La. where a one-year-old died from an apparent accidental airbag deployment, according to a media report at the time. The mother told police the car was stopped and the ignition turned off when her father unbuckled the baby and passed him forward from the back seat to her in the front seat. As she was holding the child and about to get out of the car, she says the airbag deployed for no apparent reason, hitting her and the victim.
Tyson reports “we have not had an airbag fatality in several years now.” However, danger can lurk with an older system or one that has been incorrectly repaired: One should always avoid getting too close to the mechanism.
Diagnosing the danger
Carfax has initiated a free search service that allows repairers and car shoppers to determine if a given vehicle has experienced an airbag deployment.
“About one in five deployed airbags are replaced with either dummy systems or non-working units,” according to company spokesman Christopher Basso, citing the firm’s 22,000-plus sources of proprietary information it uses to analyze vehicle histories.
“The big picture is that in about 40 percent of these fatal accidents where the airbags didn’t deploy they were defective or missing. With this fraud, you won’t know until it’s too late – it’s certainly not a victimless crime,” he says.
“When you look at all these numbers it’s a huge concern,” notes Basso. “There’s a great likelihood that there are more cases out there than what these numbers reflect.”
Repairers are encouraged to publicize to the public that you have the expertise to address a suspect airbag system. Carfax tells its customers to “have the airbag inspected by a certified body shop or mechanic. Because of these startling numbers, you have to make sure the airbags are in the vehicle and functioning properly,” he says.
OEMs emphasize the precise engineering and quality control protocols that go into the development and production of airbag systems. However, Detroit’s Big Three automakers are less than forthcoming about any problems relating to on-the-road or in-the-shop performance.
Ford did not respond to a written interview request. General Motors and Chrysler also were reticent about discussing airbag issues.
“We would rather not share proprietary information on some of these questions,” says Nick Cappa, a spokesman for Chrysler’s technology division. He referred all comment to NHTSA.
“That I do not have,” says Janine Fruehan, manager of communications for quality, safety and research and development at GM. She does take great pride in the corporation’s airbag system prowess going back to 1974 when it was the first automaker to include airbags in a production vehicle.
“Since 1990, our diagnostic capabilities have been enhanced to check the capability of the airbag approximately 10 times per second while the vehicle is running,” Fruehan says. “This is in addition to a system check upon start-up. If the diagnostic check senses a concern, the driver receives an alert on the ‘driver info center’ located on the vehicle’s instrument panel.”
Should any questions arise, “GM recommends all of its vehicle owners return their vehicles to a GM dealer for repair,” she says.
The AORC says it is more productive to focus on after-purchase faulty repairs or outright criminality rather than any problems arising from the factory. “There are widely reported cases of airbag fraud where the vehicle is repaired after an accident and instead of replacing the airbag with the correct unit, it is either replaced with the wrong unit or only a cover is replaced with no bag or inflator, and sometimes the cavity stuffed with rags or newspaper,” Campbell notes.
“This is an issue that AORC has been speaking out against due to the severe consequences of an unknowing driver not having the protection they think,” he says. “While I do not have statistics, the issue is very real and needs to be stopped.”
