Archive for the ‘airbags’ Category

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has opened an investigation regarding inadvertent airbag deployment on some Ford F-150 pickups.

In the eight consumer complaints that prompted the investigation, the driver airbag had deployed unexpectedly, either when starting the engine or shortly thereafter.

Five of the eight F-150 owners who experienced the issue suffered injuries from the airbag deployment. The investigation summary says that one tech attributed wire chaffing as the cause or potential cause.

So far, the investigation covers only the 2005 Ford F-150, but if you've experienced this...

You thought you got a great deal on a nearly new vehicle that was used as a company car. Yet weeks or months later, you find out that it doesn’t actually have the side bags on board.

With any luck, you’ll find that out before serious accident or injury, or before signing on the dotted line in the first place.

This could happen to you if you’re not careful. If you look at a late-model used car that was formerly in a rental fleet, there’s a chance that it won’t have side airbags—even if it’s a model for which side or side-curtain bags were listed as standard equipment.

Last month, rental giant Enterprise Rent-A-Car admitted that it had...

Last Thursday was the 50th birthday of the three-point safety harness, invented by Volvo's first safety engineer, Nils Bohlin. After we ran an item to commemorate the event, we got a nice note from the UK offering us a video clip with some Volvo safety history.

The video turns out to have wonderful historic footage of how safety testing used to be done, back in the old days. Note, for instance, the extremely apprehensive look on the face of one test driver (around 0:15 into the video).

At about the 1:35 mark, you'll find out why he looks that way: Test drivers belted themselves into Volvo 544s and actually drove them onto ramps to flip them...