The other day my in-laws were T-boned by a drunk driver.
My in-laws are sore but okay. The impact was hard enough to spin them around.
My father-in-law is surprised that the side-impact airbags didn't deploy. He's guessing that the other car was traveling around 40 mph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBN9UM1BnSs
I doubt it.
People vastly overestimate the speed of collisions. Look at the damage in this from 31mph.
Glad they are OK!
Same ish car, this sent them off, luckily....
Yeah, it's not the worst hit. Still, it's surprising how hard a "soft" hit can feel.
No word on whether the car can be fixed or not. Either way, my in-laws aren't young people, so glad nothing is broken.
It takes a surprising amount of force to make the front bags blow, too. One of my friends totalled his ZX2 three times (two frontals) and none of those times was hard enough to blow the bags.
Seems to vary by make and every case is different. I know when my brother collected a deer in his Chevy Malibu, it set off both front airbags. It was the middle of the night, and he drove it home without incident. Body damage was limited, with just a crinkle in the hood and a broken grille. The airbags themselves were the most expensive bit involved, and so the car was totaled by insurance.
That is the WEIRD part, deerstrikes have a high probability of setting them off. Stupid deer. Stupid tasty, tasty deer.
I have hit two deer with different vehicles. No air bags.
Comparing the damage on the blue car to when my Fiesta got hit, the side bags went off.
Our DE Subaru Legacy was tboned at an intersection. Car took of from still and hit us mid way thru intersection. All side bags, torso as curtain deployed. Kept us from having to deal with glass. About the same placement as your hit. Cost $8000 to fix. No injuries.
For frontal bags, it depends on what the sensors are. Some cars have frame twist sensors or impact sensors up front, others are accelerometer based (and unlikely to trip for a deer strike).
Jeep learned a lesson about twist / impact sensors when they first put air bags in XJs. It wasn't all that rare for the bags to blow when off-roading due to chassis flex. The later ones and their other vehicles got accelerometer sensors instead, which solved the problem.
The blue HHR hit soft stuff, so the accelerometers didn't register as high a G force as the red one, which took the impact on a wheel, which is pretty solidly mounted to the chassis.
And the car that hit them was going well under 20 mph, I'd guess.
Impact sensors are accelerometer sensors, too. They don't sense crush, they sense force.
IIRC the simplest ones are a ball on a spring, hit hard enough to make the ball move forward enough to make contact. Everything gold-plated for corrosion resistance, of course.
I'm betting that was a much slower impact than you think. The police estimated this impact was at 45 mph.
Sorry to hear about the wreck, glad everyone is OK. Modern airbags have a lot of sensors and all kinds of programming that tells them when to go off or not. I've seen lots of strange things. The HHR looks like it held up really well. Sadly, it's definitely a total loss. Let me know if you have any questions as the insurance process moves along.
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