Georgia Injury Law Blog
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the most frequent cause of airbag injuries in an accident is not late deployment or early deployment, but failure to deploy.In many cases, airbags fail to deploy because they’ve not been replaced after the car was involved in a previous crash.What is even more worrying to Atlanta car accident lawyers is that there is currently little information about the number of used cars out there that do not have airbag systems.To prevent injuries, we need to develop a system to identify such cars before they are involved in an auto accident.
There have been several cases involving repair shops that charged for replacing of airbags after the vehicle was involved in an accident and then failed to replace the systems.One such repair shop was even sued by a couple whose son was killed in an accident.The couple had paid the repair shop to install airbags on its used vehicle, and after the accident, it was found that the airbags had been stuffed with paper.
For a repair shop, replacing an airbag system would cost between $1,000 and $3,000. In the absence of any regulations of these shops, there have been many cases where owners of used vehicles drove their car out of the repair shop, believing that their car was safe.Data by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that over five years, at least 51 fatal accidents could be traced to missing airbags in cars.These airbags failed to deploy because they had never been replaced after a previous accident.
That might not seem like such a huge number, but to Atlanta car accident attorneys what is most disconcerting, is that the number could be just the tip of the iceberg.There is no way of knowing how many used vehicles are out there with no airbag systems.It doesn’t help that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has ignored this problem, even though the agency has been aware for a while now that missing airbags in used cars is a serious safety issue.