Fixing liability for defective airbags will help improve automobile safety
Automobile safety got a fillip last week with the apex consumer court reiterating the car manufacturers’ liability for defective air bags
Automobile safety got a fillip last week with the apex consumer court reiterating the car manufacturers’ liability for defective air bags.
Coming as it does after publication of the proposed amendment to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules to make airbags mandatory for the front passenger too (in addition to the driver), this order acts as a wake-up call for manufacturers to comply fully with safety standards and ensure that airbags are defect free. The new consumer protection law with its specific emphasis on product liability, also underscore this point.
The order of the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, directing Hyundai to pay ₹3 lakhs to a consumer for the failure of the air bags to deploy during a collision with a truck on the Delhi-Panipat highway in 2017, highlights the consumer’s right to compensation not only for a defective air bag, but also for the failure of the manufacturer to give complete and material information about the airbags prior to the sale.
Dismissing the argument of the manufacturer that a) the impact of the crash was not so forceful as to require the deployment of the air bag; b) that the consumer had not produced any expert evidence in support of his claim, the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission agreed with the Delhi State Consumer Commission that the photographs of the damaged vehicle showed the impact and the location of the front collision and thereby the defect in the airbags, resulting in injuries to the passengers. And that this was a case where the doctrine of Les Ipsa Loquitor ( the thing speaks for itself) applied and there was no need to rely on an expert opinion.
Presiding member CViswanath in his order also observed that “highlighting safety features including airbags while selling the car and not elaborating and disclosing the threshold limits for their opening is by itself an unfair trade practice”. (Hyundai Motors India Ltd Vs Shailender Bhatnagar, Jan 5, 2021)
A 2001 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology indicated that mortality in head-on car collisions went down by 63 per cent with the deployment of air bag and by 80 per cent in combination with the seat belt. A subsequent 2011 report in the American Journal of Orthopaedics said seat belts and air bags together brought down mortality as well as injury severity by 67 per cent. It’s for this reason that air bags are considered a critical safety feature in automobiles. In the US, an estimated 2790 lives were saved by frontal air bags in 2017.
However, for air bags to be effective, they must be made to precise standards. A wrong sensor setting, for example, could result in the airbag not being deployed in lower energy crashes, where they should be fired. According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), airbags should deploy in “moderate to severe frontal or near-frontal crashes” such as those equivalent to striking a parked car of similar size at about 16-28 mph or higher.
Any lacuna or defect in the sensor or the air bag module or the electronic control unit or the inflator could lead to failure of the air bag. In the last five years for example, Takata airbags installed in tens of millions of US vehicles across 19 manufacturers have been subject to recall due to a defect that may cause the air bag to explode, resulting in serious injuries and death. Described as the largest vehicle recalls in US history, the defective air bags have led to 400 injuries and 18 fatalities there.
Since airbags were not mandatory in India (only driver side airbag was made compulsory from 2019) manufacturers of high-end vehicles often used it as one of the major selling points and consumers have in a number of cases hauled them up for injuries caused on account of the failure of the air bags during a frontal crash and got compensation through consumer courts and even the Supreme Court.
The message from these orders is clear- respect the consumer’s right to safety and information or else pay for the consequences.
