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GM's Response to Airbag Questions

September 25, 2006

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During our investigation, we examined more than 160 complaints from consumers about their airbags failing to deploy in serious accidents. Those complaints involved the airbags in vehicles made by eight different automakers. We contacted each of those car makers and asked them to respond to the following questions.

Jim Khoury, manager of advanced safety development for General Motors North America, and Alan Adler, manager of product safety communications for General Motors Corporation, responded for the company.

1). What's your message to consumers who have safety concerns with the airbags in one of your vehicles?

Khoury: I would not characterize it as a safety concern if an airbag didn't deploy in accident. Every accident is different. A lot of times, drivers have a perception that the airbag should have deployed, when it wasn't designed to deploy in that accident.

Our customers know if there's a problem with their airbags when they turn on their vehicle. There's a light that comes on -- and flashes seven times -- to let them know the vehicle's computer is checking the systems. This also lets them know their airbag light is working. Our cars run a continual diagnostic; it gives our customers instant feedback so they know if there's a problem.

When our cars are built, we put a serial data link in them and we monitor and measure all the parameters in the vehicle. It checks the airbag system and others systems and monitors them to make sure they're clean. So the car checks itself, we check the car, and then we check our own check of the car. The amount of scrutiny and redundancy is phenomenal.

Our cars also have three elements that will protect consumers in an accident:

• The structure and metal of the car;
• The seat belt;
• The airbag.

First, our vehicles are made to crush and absorb the energy from the accident. The idea is to minimize the force on your body.

Second, our seat belts have pretensioners. (These are devices that rapidly pull in the slack on the shoulder belt when a crash sensor detects an impact. Pretensioners are designed to restrict the passenger's motion and reduce head and chest injuries.)

Third, the purpose of an airbag is to supplement the seat belt. Air bags are not designed to go off in every accident--only the most severe ones. The sensors in our cars repeatedly measure the deceleration of the vehicle, how it's crushing, and how severe the crash is going to be. These sensors are quite sophisticated and they'll determine whether the airbags should deploy in the first or second stage. GM airbags deploy with either low pressure or high pressure. They deploy with full pressure in the most severe accidents.

Adler - We run three crash tests a day on our vehicles. That's 600 a year. We also do computer simulations of crashes to find out how something is going to crash. We test and test and test, and the system monitors and monitors and monitors, so consumers are in good hands in our vehicles.

2). What should consumers do if their airbags fail to deploy during an accident in one of your vehicles?

Adler: All our divisions have Customer Assistance Centers that consumers can call. (The number for Chevrolet is 1-800-222-1020; it's 1-800-553-6000 for Saturn. All the numbers are available on the company's Web site: www.gm.com). But depending on what happened, our Customer Assistance Centers might not be able to answer all the consumers' questions.

Khoury - If consumers are walking away from an accident -- and the airbags didn't deploy -- the vehicle has done its job.

3). Does your company send someone out to investigate an accident if an airbag fails to deploy in one of your vehicles?

Adler: It would be impractical to field every call. And if someone has walked away from an accident crash, the vehicle has done its job.

Khoury: When field investigators go out, they measure the amount of the crush from where the bumper used to be to where crush ended. They take that distance and try to calculate how much force it took to crush the vehicle. If someone was injured in the accident, a lot of times there's a data recording of that accident. It's a function of the sensing diagnostic model. If the sensing diagnostic model thinks there's going to be a crash, it record the 5 or 10 second pre-crash data. It records what happens during a crash and that data can be drawn out with a tool. We believe that data belongs to the customers; it's not our data. We share the information we learn about the accidents with our customers.

4). Has your company recalled any vehicles because of problems with the airbags failing to deploy? If so, which vehicles -- year, make, model?

Adler - No. Not that we've been able to find. We've had a couple of incidents where there have been inadvertent deployments. It was a small number. But we found nothing on airbags not deploying.

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