General Maintenance & Repairs - Airbags

How fast do you usually have to be going for the airbags to deploy? Is there a certain part of the car that needs to get hit?

I'm asking cause I just crashed my car into a tree a few months ago. Yeah, I know... sucks. And to the best of my knowledge I would estimate I was going about 25-30 mph. I hit it in the front right corner pretty hard and neither of the airbags deployed. I'm not at all angry about it, I'm happy as hell they didn't deploy because it would've hurt a lot more than what happened to me (nothing) and they would've been expensive to replace.

And I know a kid with a 99-04 Mustang that got into a fender bender at slightly more than idle speed. He messed up hsi front bumper alittle bit, and both airbags went off at <10mph.

I was thinking it's 15mph :confused:

I havnt messed with airbags in a while so someone correct me if i am wrong. There are two sensors that need to go off in order to deploy the airbags. The safing sensor and impact sensor. I know the safing sensor is for dertimining the severity of the collision, and i am pretty sure the impact sensor is just to determine that there was a collision. i know that one can go off and not the other, like in your situation, therefore not deploying the airbags.

Take for example, the safing sensor. there is a ball connected to a magnet in a box and at the other end are two leads. when the impact is hard enough, momentum will force the ball away from the magnet and therefore connecting the two leads(while in conjunction with the impact sensor) and the airbags will deploy. if the collison was at a low speed, the impact sensor might be tripped, but it wasnt severe enough to trigger the safing sensor and the airbags will not be set off. once again correct me if i made a mistake.

There are no predetermined impact speeds. It's all on how you hit it. I'm an auto damage appraiser and you'd be amazed at some of the stuff I've seen when it comes to air bags. I personally don't like them, they offer a false sense of security. I've seen hits where you walk away shaking your head wondering why the hell the bags didn't go off, then you see hits like the Mustang guy you mentioned and you wonder why they DID go off.

One important question, where you wearing your seatbelt?