For many years airbags were not installed into vehicles and when they first arrived they were only placed on the driver’s side of the vehicle. In the automotive market of today, you’re going to have a hard time finding a vehicle that doesn’t have a passenger airbag, and that’s a good thing. While airbags are meant to help keep us safe in case of a collision, there are times when we can end up creating a more dangerous situation when the airbag deploys and instead of avoiding injuries, more severe injuries happen to occur.

The Warnings

Currently, we are warned against putting a rear-facing child seat in the front of a car. While this used to be common practice, if airbags were to deploy, the airbag would rocket a child seat into the back of the front seat and cause severe injuries to the child. An airbag can deploy at between 100 and 220 mph and this force will cause the child seat to be pushed with extreme force into the passenger seat which will result in injuries. Because of this, most parents are now wise enough to keep their child seats in the rear of the vehicle, but that’s not the only issue that can be caused.

How You Should Sit

It’s human nature to want to be comfortable in a vehicle and we ride in them so often that we are often numb to the true facts of what we’re doing. When we get behind the wheel of a car, truck, SUV or minivan we are taking our lives into our own hands and trusting the safety systems of the vehicle along with our own driving skills to be able to keep us safe in an accident. In order for this to work we have to sit correctly.

In the front seat especially, it’s important to sit with your feet on the floor and not up on the dashboard. We’ve seen more and more reports of people who were sitting with their legs up on the dashboard that was across the path of the airbag. This seating position when in an accident has caused several people to be irreparably injured. Whether the knees have been sent into the eye sockets and caused facial and bodily damage or legs, ankles and arms have been broken, these injuries could be avoided simply by keeping feet on the floor.

Please Be Safe

Take a look at the video below and learn how to be safe out on the roads when you’re the passenger. You can see in the video just how fast the airbag deploys and caused the legs of the crash test dummy to be forced into their upper body. Unless you like the idea of being folded in half at your waist in a forcible manner at over 100mph, you need to keep your feet on the floor. By putting your feet on the floor, you’ll allow the airbag to operate the way it’s supposed to and help you stay safe and free of harm.