Injuries Caused by Airbags
The terms "reckless driving" and "dangerous driving" are often in used in common parlance to describe the behaviour of motorists who fail to operate their vehicles in a competent and careful manner. Both are, in fact, formal legal offences with corresponding penalties for offenders. Reckless driving, for example, where a driver causes a collision, whether by driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, driving too fast, etc, is responsible for 25% of accidents on British roads each year; penalties for reckless driving include endorsements, fines, disqualification and a prison sentence of up to six months. Dangerous driving is a more serious offence, with penalties ranging up to 14 years imprisonment for causing death by dangerous driving. Of course, drivers should consider not only the legal implications of reckless or dangerous driving, but also the danger to life and limb of themselves, other road users and pedestrians that it poses.
The airbag, the safety designed to inflate in a fraction of a second to protect drivers and their passengers from the impact of a collision, was invented in the Fifties and since then has been responsible for saving thousands of lives. The problem with airbags, however, is that they must deploy rapidly (at speeds typically over 100 mph) in order to be effective and in doing so may themselves be the cause of injury. In many cases injuries, if they occur at all, are minor and take the form of abrasions or burns caused by contact an airbag as it inflates. However, anyone not wearing a seat belt, or who needs to sit closer than 10" or 12" to the steering wheel for whatever reason, or who has a medical condition may be at risk of more serious injury. Similar comments apply to children, or drivers you are knocked unconscious by a collision and are therefore are in direct contact with the steering wheel when the airbag deploys.
The majority of new cars for sale are fitted with one airbag in the steering wheel and another in the dashboard, for the protection of the driver and front seat passenger, but facial injuries, such as broken noses or eye damage and hearing damage are not uncommon when airbags deploy. In a worst case scenario, an airbag can cause fatal injury; in a recent case a 10-year-old British girl was killed when an airbag inflated with such force that it fractured her skull and although such occurrences are rare they are certainly not unknown.