It's hard to see, but in this screengrab of the 1995 Toyota Camry's IIHS offset crash test, the passenger airbag is coming out like a fist and hitting the front passenger seat at a very high speed - around 200 miles per hour - and with what is described as "coarse weave, uncoated fabric" in the test report.
Ouch.
But why were pre-1998 airbags so overpowered? Short answer: people who don't wear their seat belts. First generation airbags had to "protect" an unbelted 50th percentile male (that's about a 5'9, 172 lb dummy) in a 30 mph full frontal crash test. In short, that airbag had to slow the crash test dummy from 30 to 0 on its own. 30 mph may not sound like much, but that's 2 mph faster than the world's fastest runner's (Usain Bolt) top speed.
That's a heck of a lot of kinetic energy, so you need a bag with a lot of pressure to prevent that unbelted yahoo from copping a face full of windshield. A belted person requires much less airbag pressure, as the seat belt does most of the work. That airbag also has a very short time span to inflate - about 1/25 of a second. So in a fifth of the time it takes to blink your eye, a cushion firm enough to stop Usain Bolt at a full sprint needed to materialize.
Fortunately, today's airbags have to meet a much less stringent unbelted standard, 25 mph with 5th percentile female dummies (about 5' tall, 110 pounds). Judging by crash test performance, these newer airbags provide better protection for people wearing their seat belts than the old airbags.
Yet we can't lay all of the blame at the federal standard. Not all airbags that passed this standard were made equally, and there were ways available to make safer airbags that still met the pre-1998 standards.
In 1991, Honda pioneered the use of the top-mounted passenger airbag, which deploys initially upward toward the windshield and then rearward toward the occupant. Soon after, some other manufacturers began to use top-mounted passenger airbags as well. These designs are far safer than those where the bag deploys directly toward the occupant, and it is inexcusable that some post-1994 passenger airbags were still aimed to deploy directly toward the passenger.
Other practices of safer pre-1998 passenger airbags included higher deployment thresholds (people wearing their seat belts generally don't benefit from airbags unless the speed of impact is at least 20 mph barrier equivalent), finer weave fabric, and slower speed of deployment (even then, they didn't have to deploy at 200 mph)
Let's look at what's wrong with one of the worst pre-1998 airbags, the 1996-1997 Chrysler minivan passenger airbag (The 1994-1995 vans had a slightly better, but still very unsafe design). This airbag was so overpowered that crash tests involving a 5th percentile female dummy showed a risk of life-threatening neck injury.
It deploys directly toward the passenger, is large enough to hit the passenger seat, and deploys at a very high speed.
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