Yes, you may have a valid claim -- but who you sue depends on why the airbags failed. A defective airbag system points toward the manufacturer. A botched repair or missed inspection points somewhere else. The answer isn't always obvious, and figuring it out is one of the first things our Buffalo car accident lawyers do when a client comes in with this exact situation.
Airbag failures are more common than most people know. The injuries that result -- head trauma, facial fractures, spinal damage, death -- are often catastrophic precisely because the protection that was supposed to be there wasn't. The bag that should have saved you became part of what hurt you.
This post covers how airbag deployment works, the legal theories that apply when airbags fail, and what our car accident lawyers look for when building these cases in Buffalo.
Call us 24/7 at 716-854-1300 to speak with a personal injury lawyer near you, or contact us for a FREE consultation.
Airbags are triggered by sensors that detect the force and angle of a collision. When impact meets the threshold programmed into the vehicle's restraint control module, the system fires. Sensor detection, signal transmission, bag inflation -- the whole sequence happens in roughly 30 milliseconds.
When it works, you walk away from crashes that would otherwise be fatal.
When it doesn't, the reasons fall into two broad categories. Either the system had a defect -- in the sensor, the wiring, the control module, or the bag itself -- or the crash didn't meet the deployment threshold the manufacturer programmed into the system. That second scenario is where things get genuinely complicated, because manufacturers set those thresholds, and when they set them wrong, people get seriously hurt in crashes where the bag absolutely should have fired.
Not every collision triggers deployment. A low-speed rear impact may not meet the threshold. An unusual angle may not register the way a frontal crash would. Those are engineering decisions made long before you ever bought the vehicle.
There is no single way to bring one of these claims. The right approach depends on what caused the failure and who controlled that part of the system.
Product liability is the most common path. If the airbag system had a manufacturing defect, a design defect, or a threshold programmed too high for real-world crash conditions, the manufacturer can be held liable. New York allows strict liability claims against manufacturers -- you don't have to prove the company was careless. You prove the product was defective and the defect caused your injuries. Full stop.
Negligence against a repair shop or dealership is the second theory. A mechanic who worked on your restraint system and failed to restore it properly, a shop that cleared airbag warning lights without diagnosing the underlying problem, a dealer who replaced a bag after a prior crash and never calibrated it correctly -- all of these create negligence exposure. Our car accident lawyers see this fact pattern regularly.
Third is the claim against the at-fault driver. If someone else caused the crash, their liability extends to every consequence -- including the enhanced injuries you suffered because your airbag didn't fire. Sometimes our personal injury lawyers pursue the manufacturer and the at-fault driver simultaneously. The facts of each case determine whether that makes sense.
This is the part of these cases most people don't expect to hear about.
Every vehicle has a restraint control module -- the brain of the airbag system -- programmed with thresholds based on crash speed, direction, and force. The manufacturer decides where those thresholds sit. Set them too high and the bag won't fire in crashes where any reasonable engineer would expect it to. That's a design defect. Proving it takes expert analysis, not just a mechanic's opinion.
Our car accident lawyers retain automotive engineers and accident reconstruction specialists who extract post-crash data from the vehicle's event data recorder -- the black box most drivers don't know their car has -- and determine exactly what the system detected, what decision it made, and whether that decision was defensible. That data exists in nearly every vehicle built in the last 15 years.
Buffalo's roads give this analysis plenty of material to work with. Winter crashes on the 33 near the Kensington Avenue interchange, rear-end collisions on Route 5 approaching the Hamburg toll barrier, intersection impacts in the Cheektowaga corridor along Walden Avenue -- these are real-world crash environments where threshold calibration gets tested against actual consequences. When the data shows the system had enough information to deploy and chose not to, that becomes the center of the case.
More than one party may share liability. Our Buffalo car accident lawyers assess all of them before anything gets filed.
The vehicle manufacturer is the primary defendant when the airbag system was defective as designed or as built. This includes cases involving deployment thresholds programmed too high, sensors that failed due to poor manufacturing, and known defects the company sat on instead of recalling promptly.
Dealerships and repair shops carry liability when their work compromised the system. A restraint module that was never properly recalibrated after a prior crash repair. A technician who cleared a fault code instead of tracing it. A service writer who signed off on an inspection without actually checking the bag system. These are not hypotheticals -- they show up in real cases.
Prior owners who tampered with or disabled the airbag system create their own chain of liability depending on how the vehicle changed hands.
The at-fault driver remains on the hook for the full scope of your injuries, including whatever extra damage the missing airbag allowed. Each of these parties may have separate insurance and a very strong incentive to blame someone else. Getting them all identified early is the only way to protect the full value of the claim.
Physical and electronic evidence. Some of it disappears within days.
The vehicle itself is the most critical piece. Before it gets repaired, scrapped, or returned to a leasing company, our car accident lawyers move to preserve it. The event data recorder holds the crash data. The airbag control module holds the deployment decision. The physical condition of the sensors and wiring tells its own story -- one that gets erased the moment someone starts replacing parts.
Medical records connect the injuries to the failure. A traumatic brain injury or facial fractures in a crash where no bag deployed tells a very different story than the same injuries in a crash where deployment was never expected. Your treating physicians' documentation of what you suffered, and how severe it was relative to the impact, is part of how our personal injury lawyers show what the missing bag actually cost you.
Check the recall database too. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration maintains public records of every airbag recall. If your vehicle was subject to one and the manufacturer or dealer never notified you, that failure is directly relevant to your case.
Do not let anyone repair or dispose of the vehicle. That's the first thing. Once the car goes to the shop, the physical evidence is compromised. Once it's scrapped, the event data is gone. Our car accident lawyers have watched strong cases weaken significantly because a vehicle was towed to a body shop before anyone thought to stop it.
Get medical attention the same day, even if you feel okay. Head injuries, concussions, and soft tissue damage are common in exactly the mid-speed collisions where airbags should fire and don't. A same-day record establishes the connection between that crash and your injuries. Without it, expect the defense to argue the injuries came from somewhere else.
Document what you can at the scene. Photos of the vehicle interior showing undeployed bags. Dashboard warning lights if any were on before the crash. Your injuries. The police report. Witness contact information.
Then call our Buffalo car accident lawyers before you say anything to any insurance company.
Your airbag was supposed to deploy. It didn't. Now you're dealing with injuries that a working safety system should have prevented -- injuries caused by something someone built wrong, repaired carelessly, or never bothered to fix after a recall. RK&L's Buffalo car accident lawyers know how to identify every party responsible and how to build the case against them. Contact our office today for a free consultation.
Call us 24/7 at 716-854-1300 to speak with a personal injury lawyer near you, or contact us for a FREE consultation.
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