Daewoo Kalos User Manual page 26

1–22 SEATS AND OCCUPANT PROTECTION SYSTEMS
How air bags work
Air bags are designed to keep your
head, neck, and chest from slamming
into the instrument panel, steering wheel
or windshield in a front-end crash. They
are not designed to inflate in rear-end
or rollover crashes or in most side-im-
pact crashes. Your air bags are designed
to deploy in crashes that are equivalent
to, or exceed the force of a vehicle
traveling at a speed of 9 to 14 mph
(14.5 ~ 23 km/h) crashing into a solid
immovable wall.
This crash severity level at which the
air bag will deploy was selected to as-
sure inflation of air bags in vehicles at
S3W1202A
or below the crash severity at which a
statistical risk of death begins for fron-
tal collisions.
In the real world, cars rarely crash
squarely into immovable walls; air bags
most often deploy when a vehicle col-
lides with another vehicle. The actual
speed at which the air bags will inflate
may be higher in the real world, be-
cause real-world accidents usually in-
volve more complicated multi-vehicle
impacts, angled impacts, and incom-
plete frontal impacts (e.g. sideswipes),
and because the object struck is usually
not immovable. Because another ve-
hicle soaks up some of the force of im-
pact, unlike an immovable wall, an 9 to
14 mph (14.5 ~ 23 km/h) crash into an
immovable wall is equivalent to a head-
on full frontal impact with a stationary
vehicle of equal size and weight, while
traveling at a speed of 16 to 28 mph (26
~ 45 km/h).
NOTE
An air bag can also inflate in mod-
erate to severe non-collision situations
(e.g., slamming the undercarriage or
other solid component of the vehicle
in a dip in the driving surface) where
the crash sensors generate a signal
equivalent to a crash into a solid im-
movable barrier at 9 to 14 mph
(14.5 ~ 23 km/h)