Got in an accident

Totally sucks that you got into a fender bender but glad to hear everyone was okay and really amazed that the truck driver stopped to tell the cops what happened.

srosario said:

glad your ok
i was in and accident recently and it suck but seen ur rig and seen the other car afterwards make it feel Safe
question i always ask is where is the sensor for the airbags?
with a steel bumper do the airbag still deploy?

Click to expand...

The sensor for the airbags in most vehicles are attached near the front, one for each frame rail. I am not certain exactly where they are on his Jeep, but can comment as to why the airbags did NOT deploy. The short answer, they did their job and no deployment was necessary.

Airbag sensors are very simple in their construction. It is the Airbag Control Module that gets complicated.

Here is a roller-type sensor:



Here is a mass-type sensor:



They work really well in that they measure a change in momentum of the vehicle, not the impact. Remember, the change in momentum, or change in velocity ("Delta V" for crash engineers) is what causes injury to the occupants of a vehicle. So if the impact is sudden, enough to break the magnetic bond, the mass object will move forward and complete an electrical circuit, sending a signal to the ACU to fire the airbags. If there is not enough Delta-V, then the airbags will not deploy.

In this cause, looking at the photos, the reason the airbags did not deploy was because the impact was spread out over a couple hundred more micro-seconds, thus the average impact force was reduced (stretched) over time. This is evident here because he went over the centerline mass of the lower vehicle and into the "soft area" above the frame. If Jeep had been lower, he would have had a face full of airbag, since the sudden "jolt" would have broken the magnetic bond when the frame of the Jeep was stopped by the frame of the front vehicle.

Hope this helps you understand.

Pretty sure the airbag sensors in the JK are under the center console.

thanks nevada for the break down, now i understand,

You learn something new every day, thanks Nevada!