• 15
  • April
    2011

By now, most people have heard of the auto defect problems Toyota Motor Company has had in recent years with instances of unintended acceleration in their vehicles. Federal safety regulators appear to now have uncovered a whole new can of worms with inconsistent airbag deployment. This is unfortunate news for the auto maker, as they've already had to recall $19.2 million vehicles globally in the last year and a half, alone.

The situation that finally piqued the interest of federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was when the airbags on a 2008 Corolla failed to deploy recently after the car hit a deer at 55 miles per hour. The car hit the deer head-on, so the airbags should have deployed but failed to do so.

So far, there have been over 170 reported instances to ConsumerAffairs.com of failed or faulty airbag deployment on various Toyota vehicles. One of these instances occurred in Laredo, Texas where the airbags of a Toyota failed to deploy after the man's car hit a tree at 35 miles per hour. Other instances that raise concern include a head-on-collision between a Camry and a truck where the Camry's airbags failed to deploy, a rollover accident involving a collision with a culvert that failed to produce airbag deployment and resulted in serious injuries to the driver, and an instance where a Prius ran into a ditch where one of the airbag sensors was hit without resulting in airbag deployment.

And the list goes on. There is a wide variety of instances on record where anything from T-bone accidents, rollovers and head-on collisions failed to properly trigger the airbag sensors in multiple Toyota models over the course of multiple model years. In some cases, airbags were even found to have deployed for no apparent reason.

For now, the NHTSA's investigation will focus on the 2008 Corolla model, affecting as many as 170,000 vehicles.

Source: ConsumerAffairs.com "Feds Probe Toyota Airbag Problems" by Truman Lewis, 4/14/11