our puppy's doing great. thanks for asking.

i agree. i have been researching this issue for 22 straight days consulting with engineers, lawyers, and different people in 4 other forums. i've also studied law suits and recalls about faulty seat belts and air bags. this is a controversial issue.

the best idea i've heard so far is instead of standardizing the seat belt/air bag, why don't they use the harness that they use in Nascar. well at least only as an option. i know a lot of people would find this excessive but those who went through an accident like mine who saw the passenger getting hurt a lot more, i don't mind paying that extra dough for that safety harness.

 

5-point harness haven't been instituted in regular cars/trucks primarily for 2 reasons

1) Customer comfort - many people already don't wear their seatbelts (at least in the US) because they complain that they aren't comfortable and restrict their movement. 5-point harness restrict ALL movement if worn properly. (I have 5-point harnesses and a full roll-cage in my off-road racing truck...you don't move at all.)

2) Structure to support the harnesses. If you look at applications where 5-point harnesses are used, you'll notice that there is always a load bar place directly behind the shoulders of the front seat running width-wise across the car. This bar is required to have the seatbelt loads applied to the occupant in the proper direction. If you attach the belts to the floor and simply route them through the seat, the occupant stands the chance of their spine being vertically crushed by the belt loads applied to them. This structure must be very rigid, and would be placed directly in-line with the head impact zone of the rear seat passengers. You could possibly add the 5-points completely within the seat, but then you have to beef up the entire seat structure to withstand the seatbelt loads that are currently carried by the floor and b-pillar of the car.

5-point harnesses are the ideal situation, but if you've ever worn them before, they are quite uncomfortable and aren't something you'd want to have to deal with in a daily driver.

 

Hey romanmojica,
Sorry, didn't mean to come off as being really harsh on ya. And i'm sure it's alot easier for us to "Monday Night Quarterback" the whole thing as well. Sucks you crashed,...too bad the airbags didn't go off.....Thank God your ok,....and lastly,...i still don't like little dogs riding around in cars j/k
Watch out tho...if Tracker likes the dog, he's liable to steal it :P

Kevin-

 

Sorry too for reacting a little strong. Its been really tough.

 

Well in the past two weeks, the technical consultant who did our report has not been taking my calls and my request to have a copy of the data extracted from the Restraint Control Module (RCM). Word from his office is that he has been in the field and no one knows where he is and where to contact him.

That is very unfortunate.

 

Airbags are a science. They deploy when they are supposed to, if they didn't then they weren't supposed too. Airbags are not fluffy pillows of safety that reach out and hug you out of harms way. They inflate and defate in deciseconds with a LOT of force.

I'm not an expert of any kind, but I would say that since you hit a very narrow divider it in essence, cut into the middle of your car absorbing a LOT of force. If you were to have hit a solid wall at that speed completely purpendicular to it then you might have seen different results from the air bags.

I've been in wrecks man, I know it sucks, and emotions run high, but there is no one to point the finger at but yourself...don't hit dividers......

 

You say you are not an expert but insist that the airbags weren't suppose to open. No chance at all?? I did 4 months of research. It is far from a perfect science.

What I am saying is simple. Why were seat belts invented? For freak accidents like ours. Why were air bags invented? To supplement seat belts and make the car even safer.

It was a total wreck, head-on crash to a concrete block wedged to the cemented road island. Even with seatbelts, the driver hit the wheel and the passenger almost got killed with a bruised throat after hitting the dashboard where the "air bag" sign is.

Yeah, granted and giving the benefit of the doubt that the air bags were not suppose to open, Mazda and Ford still did a poor investigation. Our complaint now is more of how they handled our incident.

If anyone wants to read their investigation report, I can scan the document and post a link to it here.

 

I'm not an expert but I understand very well the pros and cons of airbags. Airbags can kill people just as easily as they can save people. Knowing when to deploy and when not to is an extremely technical process. Maybe yours should have gone off, but if setting them to go off in a crash like yours would also trigger them in other accidents where they would do more harm than good then that is an option the company has to weigh.

As I said before the divider made it a good way into the bodfy of the car. This dissapated the energy over a longer amount of time. You should be able to get the technical data on the accelerometers in the car. I would assume they weren't far from deploying. This is stuff Mazda technically could provide you. I'm sorry they don't seem to be taking this or you very seriously.

 

This is more a case of wanting proprietary information that you probably wouldn't know what do do with. (If you were to look at the accelerometer trace, would you have any idea what you were looking at? I bet not.)

Again....It is unfortunate that you were injured in your accident. The crash conditions in your pics from the incident are almost identical to those listed in the owner's manual as a condition where the airbags may not deploy due to how the loads are distributed during impact. In other words, it's designed that way.

If you hit the steering wheel/dashboard, you were not wearing your seatbelts properly as they lock up during impact to prevent excessive movement of the occupants. However, the fact that these systems (steering wheels, dashboards, etc.) are designed to withstand a certain amount of impact (specifically head impact testing is performed on these systems) says that it's possible for you to hit these objects given certain conditions (like an improperly worn seatbelt, seatback reclined too far, etc), and that the system has taken this into account. 40 years ago steering wheels and dashboards were made of steel and would have busted both of you wide open.

My opinion is this (purely my opinion)....you feel that your impact should have deployed the bags, regardless of the data that is/isn't presented to you, you will still have this opinion and will change your tone from "it didn't work as intended" to that of "it's designed wrong".

I hope you, your wife, and your little dog are feeling better.

 

He actually would've been better off to hit something that spread the impact point over a larger area. That would have absorbed the energy better than hitting a long thin structure.