New York Personal Injury Lawyers

Airbags have become a valuable safety resource in the modern-day automobile. They have helped prevent many accidents from developing into serious or even fatal ones. However, cases of defective airbags not going off when they are supposed to and going off when they are not supposed to happen often as well, causing personal injury to those who should have never been susceptible to injury.

A defective airbag is always the responsibility of the company that produced it. Sometimes an airbag will not receive enough tests to ensure it will work properly in an accident before it is put on the market. Other times companies will overlook a faulty case to save money. And even other times it can be a simple mistake in its installation. Regardless, when you purchase a vehicle that promises airbags, anytime they cause injury, you deserve retribution.

There are several different ways an airbag can be defective and cause you unnecessary harm :

A failure to deploy or late deployment can cause drivers and passengers to suffer the type of accidents an airbag is supposed to prevent (bodily collision with the window, steering wheel, or dashboard). In late deployment, not only are you susceptible to the injuries an airbag is supposed to prevent, but you can receive additional injuries if it goes off when you are too close to it.

Airbags can also deploy at improper angles. They are designed to come out at a specific angle to give you the best protection it can offer. If the airbag comes out incorrectly, it can collide with a passenger’s body in an unnatural and unsafe way.

Then there are situations when the airbag goes off when it doesn’t need to. When airbags do deploy, they come out quickly and powerfully to counter the impact of an accident. Unnecessary deployment of an airbag in a minor collision can put drivers and passengers in the way of injuries they would have never received had the airbags not come out at all. There are also incidents of airbags deploying for no reason. In these incidences, not only are people in the car susceptible to the injuries the deployment of an airbag can cause, but an arbitrary deployment can restrict the driver’s visibility of the road, leading to an accident.

Sometimes an airbag will deploy at the right time, but it will come out with overpowering force.  If the airbag is deployed too quickly and violently, it can cause injury or death to whomever it’s supposed to protect. With this in mind, children or small adults are more likely to be injured by an airbag than a fully grown adult. It is a good idea to have children and smaller people sit in the backseat to avoid extraneous injury.

If you suffer from any of these airbag defects, there is compensation to be paid by the company who supplied you with the vehicle. Most companies (personal injury firms, defective airbag accident attorneys) that will help you receive compensation will first offer to look at your situation for free to determine if you have a legitimate case. Oftentimes they will make use of the “black box” in the vehicle, which records information about the severity of an accident as well as if the airbags were deployed properly. This information will help you get what you deserve.