Airbags

‘Seat Belts Save Lives’ was a major road safety slogan many years ago, and how true it was. By far the biggest drop in injuries and deaths in car crashes occurred when seat belt wearing became compulsory in Australia.

Airbags, which began to be fitted to upmarket cars during the early 1990s, and which are common in everything on the market these days, are intended to work in conjunction with seat belts to further improve safety in crashes. This is why airbags are technically called Supplementary Restraint Systems, or SRS.

Let me repeat before going into details on airbags: safety belts must still be used even when airbags are fitted or you are putting yourself and other occupants of the vehicle in increased danger.

Airbags explode from the centre of the steering wheel and sometimes also from the dashboard ahead of the front passenger, when a crash starts to occur. In most cars the airbags explode outwards when a crash of more than a given severity is sensed by the car. This can be at relatively low speeds. More sophisticated systems sense not just that a crash has started to occur, but that a preset degree of deceleration has been reached. So they don’t operate when the sensors indicate they are not required. This can make a huge difference to repair costs following the crash.

Even more complex are sensors that ‘know’ whether the front passenger seat is occupied and the approximate weight of the occupant. They then tailor the timing and/or inflation pressure of the airbag.

Side airbags come out of the door pillars, or from the sides of the seats themselves. The latter is the preferred way of doing it as the ‘bags can be smaller because they don’t need to allow for different seat positions. Earlier side airbags often only protected the side of the occupants’ bodies. Later ones also look after the sides of their heads as well.

Side-curtain airbags come down from the rail over the tops of the doors, or back from the windscreen pillars, offering side protection in a crash. Sometimes this side protection was only for the occupants of the front seat occupants, these days it's much more common for the airbags to look after those in the back seats as well.

Indeed, some of the more advanced people movers and/or SUVs have airbags that protect those in the third row of seats if one is installed. If inspecting a used example of one of the latter check what is installed, that's because an extra row of seats may have been installed later, without any upgrading of the curtain airbags at the same time.

Side airbags are generally only fitted to the front seats, but some upmarket cars also use them on the back seats.

A fairly recent innovation is the knee airbag. As the name suggests it protects the knees of the driver, it also reduces the chances of the driver’s feet become entangled in the pedals.The most recent airbags look after the knees of not only the driver, but also the front passenger.

In all the road tests, both in this newspaper and in our website www.mister-cars.com/ we list the number of airbags fitted to our cars that we review in our weekly road tests.

Note that different model variants within the vehicle range are likely to have different numbers of airbags as standard. Sadly, though understandably, the lower-cost models are likely to be those with the fewest airbags. However, it's not that unusual to find new cars that don’t have at least driver’s and front passenger airbags. Additional airbags are often extra cost options. Enquire from the dealer whether these can be purchased as part of a package, probably with ESP (Electronic Stability Program), at a reduced cost.

It's a legal requirement that the wording either ‘SRS Airbag’ or, more recently, simply ‘Airbag’ must be placed in the vicinity of the airbag. Beware the fools who disconnect airbags to save the cost of repairs to the car after a crash (true!). There will probably be a warning light on the dashboard to warn of this.

Airbags

Airbags Save Lives