How do airbags know when to deploy

The "Supplemental Restraint Systems," or SRS, as they are called are designed to help the car's seatbelts protect occupants. Airbags prevent occupants from hitting parts inside the car and also help cushion the violent movement of the body during an impact. Sensors in the car detect when an impact has happened.

The sensors send a signal indicating sudden deceleration to a computer inside the car. Airbags won't deploy in low-speed crashes in which seatbelts alone should provide enough protection. The computer determines, based on the signal it's getting from the sensor, whether the airbag needs to deploy. The computer also takes into account data from other sensors in the front seats to determine whether there is someone sitting in the passenger seat and how big that person is.

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Queensland must do's. Experience and Services Accommodation Terms and conditions. Home Rescue. Get Home Rescue Additional service callout fees. Home Quick Fix terms and conditions Pricing. About Business Support Contact. Car safety features. Airbags are now an almost universal feature of cars. Find out more about them. Print Print. Search Search. Crash conditions may have been sufficiently moderate where an airbag would not be needed to protect an occupant wearing a seat belt.

The seat belt may provide sufficient protection from a head or chest injury in such a crash. The type of crash that occurs is a major factor in whether or not airbags deploy.

For example, frontal airbag deployment should be expected in moderate to severe impacts to the front bumper or front corners of your vehicle. Depending on where your vehicle was struck, airbag sensors may not have been triggered.

This can happen when frontal airbags do not fire in certain types of rollover collisions, or during side or rear impact crashes. As with any other car part, it is possible for airbag sensors to fail to correctly detect impact or deploy the airbag, as the result of improper design, testing or installation of sensors, or because of software failure.

NHTSA recommends that children under 13 years old ride in the back seat in the appropriate child restraint systems for their age and size: rear-facing car seats, forward-facing car seats, booster seats, or adult seat belts. For information on tweens, see our Seat Belts section. The proper operation of some advanced frontal air bag systems is highly dependent on the pressure also known as "loading" placed on the seat bottom by the driver or passenger. Situations that add or subtract sensed weight can result in an occupant misclassification.

Once deployed, an air bag — whether advanced frontal or another type — cannot be re-used and must be replaced by an authorized service technician without delay. All light vehicles passenger cars and light-duty trucks must meet specific safety performance criteria for dummies representing month-old infants, 3-year-old toddlers, 6-year-old children, and small-stature women.

For those manufacturers electing to suppress not deploy an air bag for an infant or child in all crashes, the occupant-sensing devices in their advanced frontal air bag systems have been tested with child-sized dummies, representing an infant in a child safety seat and small children in and out of child safety seats, to ensure that the air bag will turn itself off.

To minimize the potential of any air-bag-related injury, NHTSA still recommends keeping a inch minimum between the air bag cover in the center of the steering wheel for drivers and on the dashboard for the right front passenger , maintaining a proper seating position, and moving the seat as far back as possible drivers should be able to comfortably reach the pedals. Frontal air bags have come a long way since they first appeared in the s.

Although those older air bags saved thousands of lives, they deployed the same way for every driver and passenger, causing injury and in some rare cases even death to children, small adults, and any unbelted occupants positioned too close to the air bag as it deployed.

Today's advanced frontal air bags are better able to protect drivers and front seat passengers by using sophisticated sensing systems to determine whether, when and how much to deploy.

This included phasing and prioritizing when the replacement parts are required to be available to consumers since it was not possible for all of the replacement parts to be available right away and some vehicles were at much higher risk of a dangerous air bag explosion than others.

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Air Bags Facts. Estimated lives occupants 13 and older saved by frontal air bags in