Special Investigation - Airbags
The grave dangers of packing the wrong type of bags It's a life or death issue. Backyard repairers folding airbags into the dash or the steering wheel improperly with no regard for the safety of the driver or passenger. In some cases it's worse - the bag hasn't been replaced at all. Will Tuck reports on a deflatingly dire situation.
THIS ALL STARTED when Paint & Panel discovered the sale of SRS components on auction site E-Bay.
Surely, the sale of secondhand airbag bits from a wrecked car, especially the SRS system, couldn't be a good thing. Surely it's illegal as well? Right on the first count, wrong on the second. As far as we were able to ascertain, the sale of secondhand airbags and spares is not illegal and furthermore some experts do not recognise the practise as anything to worry about.
Just the same we decided the airbag issue was worth investigating and who better than to put us right than Wayne Hills, of SRS Services, an independent South Australian insurance-approved SRS/Airbag refitter.
The business is in bodyshops all over SA, putting new bags into vehicles that have lost theirs or replacing pre-tensioners in seat belt systems. Hills' deep and wide knowledge of the problems involved in SRS and restraint system issues means he is often asked to consult on all things airbags.
If the bag isn't refitted correctly, if it is the wrong sort of bag for the job, or even if it isn't there at all, then a major disaster could be just around the corner.
Research from the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, has made one of the few comparative studies between the incidence of death in vehicles with airbags and those without. The bottom line is that drivers and passengers involved in fullfrontal or front-angled accidents in cars fitted with airbags and properly-adjusted restraint systems (seat belts) were 23 per cent more likely to survive than those without.
Although there have been some serious incidents in this country relating to airbag fittings, they pale into comparison to those in the US. In a recent case in southern California, the Ellsworth family learned that their l8-year-old son Bobby and friend Waylon Blocker had been visiting friends near San Diego. At 1.50am Ellsworth and Waylon made their way home in Blocker's pick-up truck. Tired from their evening's entertainment, driving down a lonely secondary road, their truck crossed the centre line and collided head-on into a BMW.
There were injuries all round, but only Ellsworth died. Bobby's dad Bob Ellsworth, said the death was catastrophic for the family but what was worse was how he died. No airbags deployed in the truck because there weren't any.
Each airbag compartment was stuffed with paper, fitted and then re-sealed. A forensic scientist with the US Institute of Risk and safety Analysis, Kenneth Alvin Solomon, said if Ellsworth had had been protected by an airbag, he would have survived.
In another tragic US accident reported by Aaron Cobb of the US Special Investigations Unit for Farmers' Insurance, a driver was seriously injured and her mother died in the front passenger seat in a head-on collision. The car had been rebuilt but on repairing and re-birthing the vehicle the backyarders had removed the driver's side airbag. Further, the passenger-side airbag was inoperative. It had deployed in a previous accident and had just been stuffed back into the dashboard passenger compartment.
In New York, Detective Tom Burke of the NYPD Auto Crimes Division, remembers a grim motor accident involving five teenagers on the Throgs Neck Expressway in New York city when their used car spun off the road and hit a tree. The airbags didn't go off because the backyarder who fixed the car, that had been in a previous accident, bought airbags off the internet and didn't install them correctly.
Two of the boys died.
Such accidents in Australia are highly unusual. But, as the experts say, it's only a matter of time.With the economic downturn biting big time in all facets of the auto industry and all sorts of avenues being explored to saving money, some vehicle owners might turn to a backyarder, with few airbag skills. Even worse, a desire to rip-off the owner. With that in mind, there is a need to be ever more diligent in making sure the airbag repair is right.
Right now it's all a question of quality seat belts and airbag fittings. If a seat belt is deployed in a collision, it's not the only safety item that has to be replaced. The seatbelt pre-tensioners, housed either in the inertia reel or the buckle stalk of the belt, have to be replaced too. If the belt work is not done then that is another disaster. If the belt does not instantly tighten on impact then the interaction between bag and belt can also be catastrophic, Hills says.
This is because the belt, if it does its job properly, ensures the person is upright and secure when the bag is deployed.
"If you are not wearing a seat belt an airbag deployment can almost be fatal. The whole purpose of the seatbelt tensioners pre-tightening is to ensure that the body is upright so that when the deployed bag hits it, the body position is correct and the bag will not bruise you heavily," Hills says.
"In an accident you have two pyrotechnic happenings, the bag and the seat belt pre-tensioner - the means of shortening or tightening the belt. Generally it is the seat buckle which will pull down 100mm on deployment at the same time as the bag is deployed," Hills says. "Conversely, the actual inertia reel side of the belt will reverse the reel and tighten it up that way."
Hills says the sash side of the belt that runs across the abdomen and is bolted to the floor, can also have a pyrotechnic device where it tightens-up and pulls it in to prevent the body submarining into the foot well or wherever.
The key to the SRS issue is who does the repair and whether you can trust them or not. Having the local bodyshop do the work, having it checked by an expert and seeing the comforting SRS red light illuminate on the instrument panel when the ignition goes on, is reassuring. However, in this high-tech age, anything to rort the system is possible, especially if you know a way around the warning light system.
"You can bypass the light. I have come across instances where that has been attempted. In one instance, where a bypass was carried out, a young woman purchased a secondhand vehicle in good faith and she did not know the vehicle had been in a previous accident and repaired after the airbags had deployed," Hills says.
"The buyer then had an accident of her own and luckily she wasn't injured, but the impact was bad enough to have triggered the airbags. "Nothing happened, the bags didn't deploy and I was asked by a motoring organisation to find out why.
"The repairer had bypassed the system, removing the airbag warning light and made it so both the driver's and the passenger's airbag systems looked okay but were inoperable. You only have to speculate on what would have happened if the accident had been more serious."
Hills says his examination showed the bags were just stacked-in and crudely made to look good, along with the seat belt pre-tensioners.
It's not Hills' only encounter with such dangerous practices. "I once came across a secondhand Hyundai Lantra, again purchased by an unsuspecting young woman, where the globe had been removed. The purchaser was referred to me when she came to sell the vehicle. There was no airbag, airbag control units, or seat belt tensioners fitted to the repaired vehicle. The globe of the warning light had been removed and now the young woman wanted to sell the vehicle, she had to replace everything. It cost her over $3500.
"The young woman had paid a good price for the vehicle but when she came to selling, a year later she discovered the omission, it was too late. The backyarder had gone."
Hills warns repairers and purchasers to be particularly aware of sports steering wheels. "The wheel may be changed but what has happened to the airbag unit that is lodged in the centre console?"
Reputable bodyshops and parts suppliers spoken to by Paint & Panel say they would never consider being anything less than 100 per cent best practice when it came to re-fitting airbags and seat belt accessories.
Gerard O'Hanian, GM Parts Division of Trivett Classic Parramatta (Sydney), says he would not buy either airbags or airbag parts from anyone other than a reputed airbag company or manufacturer.
"In such a case the parts would be genuine but if you buy them from a private seller or wrecking yard you have to be careful. There are people who will buy airbags that are non-genuine or very cheap and put them into a steering wheel to make sure there is nothing wrong with the system. There are a lot of backyarders that go to auctions, buy the write-offs and get a couple of secondhand panels to repair the car cheaply. They make the car look pretty and put in an airbag that doesn't work so they can sell the car."
O'Hanian says that even if the car does not have a major accident, the bag could go off if it is not fitted correctly and this can be just as dangerous.
Lee Koudsy, MD of LSR Autobody Sydney, agrees. "Airbags are dangerous parts and they need to be replaced with genuine parts. The problem is that there are always people who do not do the right thing. The industry is full of reliable and good tradespeople but there are always those who want to make easy money and take short cuts."
Koudsy says all of the airbag and pre-tensioner equipment is dangerous. "Most of the imported materials are exported by ship because the airbag materials are explosive and that's just what you don't need in an aircraft. The wiring and sensor replacement has to be reset by computers supplied by the manufacturers and often we have to send cars to designated dealers of manufacturers to get equipment re-set." Koudsy says he is convinced of the dictate that no attempt should be made to replace the airbag or accessories unless the parts supplied by the manufacturers' are genuine.
"I also believe most insurance companies should ban the use of used airbags, sensors and seat belt tensioners if the car is written off. "Unfortunately, there is no law against using secondhand airbag accessories," Koudsy adds with trepidation.