Impressed with the airbags

PriusOverlanding sells an aluminum skid plate that will protect you from this kind of damage.

I went offroad a couple days ago and hit a rock about the same size in your picture and had zero damage.

QR code to the skid plate but they are on back order right now.

 

What’s the miles on it?

anyone have a dash cam; they might be able to trace the dump truck, get somewhere.

 

Rocks dropped from a truck carrying heavy oil field equipment, still bouncing up to eye level and causing eye and skin injuries from shattered glass, were what finally prompted me to get dashcams. I moved aside enough to avoid one that would have struck the windshield right in front of my face, but the side mirror bounced another into the side triangle window, showering glass into every cupholder and storage pocket and vent throughout the entire vehicle. A dashcam would have identified the offending truck to pay our ER and window replacement and extra lodging bills.

Minor fender benders should not deploy the airbags. Or even some medium ones. At least not the modern airbags. BTDT long ago. It should take a fairly significant shock or deceleration to do so.

 

The picture suggests this wasn't a giant rock or anything, but was down there along the car's midline and probably knocked the sheet metal down there just about exactly where the front airbag sensor is.

So that sensor probably saw an instantaneous acceleration closer to what it would normally see only when a bigger crash crushes and crumples a bunch of the energy-absorbing stuff in the car's nose. Instead, this was just an instantaneous knock to right where the sensor is.

Just lucky I guess...

 

Funny how chapman disagrees with even photographic evidence.

No matter what you call it, a hefty boulder, a large boulder or a rock.

That looks like a big rock, but I guess it wasnt a "giant rock" in your eyes.

Does it look bigger than a brick chapman?

 

To my eyes it appears larger than a standard brick, smaller than a standard concrete block. It might match one of the decorative blocks or pavers I could buy at Menards. Smaller than things I call boulders.

The key is it seems to only barely exceed the car's ground clearance. It's sitting there almost below that cross member, and only peeled back a little of the material shown there.

That means it evaded all of the energy-absorbing foam and crush boxes and crumpling ability of the car's bumper and nose, and delivered a direct bang right near the mounting location of an airbag sensor, which is calibrated for the amount of energy that normally gets through all that absorbing stuff in a more normal crash.

So, the otherwise little-damaged car deployed the airbags (and broke its own windshield with the passenger airbag).

Just lucky I guess....

 

My idea of a boulder is being big enough to crumple at least the grill or bumper. This one isn't tall enough to lift even a single tire off the ground.

 

That alone, maybe take the totaled settlement.

 

Have you still got it? Could you post measurements? My curiosity is piqued now that a few of us have looked at the picture and seem to have come away with different impressions of it (sort of like that white/gold or blue/black dress the internet was arguing about for a while).

About 8 by 8 by 16 inches would be a standard concrete block.

This might be an example of how something alarming can be perceived very differently by the person it happens to than perhaps by a bystander. The stop certainly wasn't 'instant' (that would be ∞ deceleration) and probably wasn't nearly as short as it seemed. The car (which I'll take to be about 1500 kg with you in it) at 30 mph had about 0.27 megajoules of kinetic energy, which amount of energy (about a quarter stick of dynamite equivalent) all had gone somewhere by the time everything stopped. Things look like that happened gradually enough to not change the shape of the car a whole lot. I'll guess you ended up hitting the brakes (but might not remember) and they did a lot of the work, and the car moved the rock some distance down the road.

I had kind of the opposite time-perception effect happen to me once, when I leaned on an electric fence. That normally just made an annoying zap, but I was also leaning on a very well-grounded chain-link fence at the same time.

To me, I was stuck there being shocked for a long time, long enough I thought up and rejected four or five different explanations for what was happening by the time I hit the ground. Everybody else who saw it says I just touched the wire and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.