When airbags work properly, they are critical to preventing injuries and saving lives. However, an airbag that is improperly designed or manufactured can seriously injure or kill innocent people. Often, defective airbags can be the cause of injuries in a frontal or side impact car collisions. Faulty airbags can fail in a number of ways, including if the airbag: Faulty airbags can fail in a number of ways, including if the airbag:
- Hit an occupant before being fully inflated.
- Punched out of its storage compartment and strikes an occupant with excessive force.
- Deployed unnecessarily in a minor accident, causing injury that would not have happened otherwise.
- Ruptured and sprayed shrapnel into the vehicle compartment, like the problem with Takata airbags.
- Failed to deploy.
- Had incorrectly calibrated sensors that caused overly aggressive deployment or no deployment at all.
In airbag cases it is important to evaluate whether the airbag caused or enhanced the injury, such as loss of an eye, blindness, head trauma, shrapnel injury, or failed to deploy and prevent a catastrophic head or spinal cord injury.
Anytime someone has sustained injuries after an airbag impact, a close examination of the safety performance of the airbag must be completed.
For more than 30 years, injured people and their families – as well as referring attorneys – have turned to Atlee Hall, LLP for help with catastrophic injury cases involving airbag defects. During that time, we have taken on the world’s largest auto product manufacturers in cases involving a range of airbag defects.
