this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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This seems to come up concerningly often enough in the airbag industry...
It’s really a non issue. Good on the regulators for pushing for it, but over 14-15 years across the entirety of US and Canada there have only been 7 possible injuries and 2 possible deaths from it.
Across hundreds of millions of vehicles that have had these in them since 2009.
Combine that with the odds that you're going to survive a car accident because of the airbag alone.
With those kind of numbers, we would call a death from airbag a "freak accident". Regulators really don't need to waste time on this when there are so many bigger and better targets to pour resources into.
I hate it when the tin-foil-hatters end up being coincidentally right about something.
I mean, air bag inflator are pretty much just explosive devices to begin with, just ones that are calibrated to only make enough of an explosion to fill up an air bag and no more. I can't think of a more obvious failure mode than exploding too much except for not exploding enough.
The issue isn’t exploding too much, it’s that on a very small sample of them, some of the welding could block the exhaust port that goes to fill the airbag up.
So without that exhaust, the thing just explodes like a small bomb rather than filling the airbag.
The actual number is ridiculously tiny though. They only have less than 10 possible cases across hundreds of millions of airbags over 14 years across the US and Canada.