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" Late last week, we reported on the federal, congressional, and National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) investigation into 1.6 million General Motors cars with faulty ignitions, and the scope of the mechanical failure that can cause a car to shut off involuntarily, and in turn, switch off safety systems including power steering and airbags. On top of that, GM has announced a further round of recalls unrelated to the ignition switch problem, two of which also pertain to airbags: 1.17 million examples of the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave, GMC Acadia, and Saturn Outlook have side airbags that will fail to function if the airbag warning light is illuminated, and the dash trim covering 303,000 Chevrolet Express and GMC Savanna passenger-side airbags doesn&amp;#039;t meet federal standards. This past Friday, the Center for Automotive Safety published a letter to NHTSA demanding to know why it hadn&amp;#039;t investigated several fatal accidents in Saturn Ion and Chevy Cobalt models. CAS is alleging that 303 fatalities were linked to the ignition switch failure. It&amp;#039;s not that simple, though. Here&amp;#039;s why the front airbag or side airbag or knee airbag in your car may not fire in the event of accident, and why in some cases it&amp;#039;s supposed to happen that way by design. How Airbag Failures Are Tracked First, you need to understand how NHTSA collects data on failed airbag deployment. There are two large databases of fatal accidents. One gets its data from police on the scene. That system is called the Fatal Analysis Reporting System, or FARS. The other is the National Automotive Sampling System/Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS), created by post-accident investigators who dive more deeply into the nature of the crashes. But the two databases don&amp;#039;t always match. FARS tends to over-report airbag &amp;quot;failures&amp;quot; because the cops are just checking a box about whether or not the front airbags fired\u2014they aren&amp;#039;t asked to determine whether the airbags should have fired. For example, the crash sensors aren&amp;#039;t designed to trigger the front airbag if the car is hit from the side. That&amp;#039;s because it would do nothing to prevent injury, while the side airbag or a curtain airbag could save the driver&amp;#039;s life. But if that front airbag doesn&amp;#039;t fire, the officer will note that, and that info will be relayed to FARS. This has caused a great deal of controversy. A few years ago, many media outlets reported that as many as 18 percent of fatalities in collisions were caused by airbag nondeployment, but a 2010 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety report found that when cross-tabulating these airbag failures against the more thorough NASS studies, the &amp;quot;failure&amp;quot; rate was closer to 8 percent. Why the Airbag Didn&amp;#039;t Go Off That number still sounds high, which is why we called David Zuby, chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Zuby explained that although airbags may not have fired in roughly 8 percent of fatal accidents, that doesn&amp;#039;t fully explain what&amp;#039;s going on. &amp;quot;Crashes are complicated,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s say it&amp;#039;s a rollover crash where someone&amp;#039;s ejected because they&amp;#039;re not belted. It&amp;#039;s unlikely the airbag would have done anything to save that driver&amp;#039;s life.&amp;quot; Zuby says that you always hear of a friend or relative, or may have experienced an accident first hand, where the front airbag didn&amp;#039;t fire. These are often less severe crashes, and automakers have been exceedingly careful to ensure that the airbag doesn&amp;#039;t pop because (a) a new airbag is expensive and (b) there&amp;#039;s always some danger that an airbag could hurt rather than help. Cars made since 2007 have sophisticated electronics that determine not only whether to launch the airbag but also what velocity is required to protect the occupants based on the nature of the accident. If the system is working properly, the front airbag should never go off when it can&amp;#039;t help mitigate injury. Thus, attributing all 303 fatalities to the ignition/airbag fault is at least premature. &amp;quot;You have to look at how many of the nondeployments factor into fatalities,&amp;quot; Zuby says. And to determine that, each accident must be examined for other causes of grave injury. Until you know if the airbag should have fired, and could have prevented the fatality, you can&amp;#039;t conclude cause and effect. One important thing to understand is that IIHS works for insurance companies. Its job isn&amp;#039;t just safety but finding out who should pay for negligence if there is any to be found. And that means that IIHS would like to see more data captured by Event Data Recorders, the so-called black-box equivalent for cars. Zuby says these can greatly aid in accident re-creation because they can include speed, telemetry, whether (and when) the brakes were applied, whether the seat belts were buckled, and more. But he cautions that the sensor information isn&amp;#039;t perfect, either. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a10256/the-gm-recall-and-some-clarity-about-airbags-16608141/>