BMW is required to reimburse the guy Rs. 1 lakh since the airbags don’t deploy

The German automaker BMW has been ordered to pay Rs 1,00,000 by the National Consumer Forum, Hyderabad-1, for upsetting Hyderabad citizens who claimed the car’s airbags malfunctioned after a collision, injuring people.

 

The complainant, Shriram Shimha Teja, was driving his BMW 3 Series GT from Pondicherry to Nagapattinam in March 2022 when it collided with a truck traveling in the other way. The collision caused serious damage to the automobile.

Teja said that the absence of airbag deployment in their vehicle caused him to sustain lifelong scars from the broken glass fragments of the windshield.

“Threshold exceeded”

BMW India Private Limited, a company located in Gurugram, countered that the crumple zone—structural parts of a car’s front and back intended to absorb energy—absorbed the force of the collision and that the airbags did not need to activate.

The well-known automaker said that the airbags were not intended to activate in the case of an accident with the windshield and that the minimal threshold limit needed for their activation had not been met.

“The car has no defects.”

BMW said in their study that their vehicle had no defects and that “the safety belt provides sufficient protection in such situations, so the airbag system must not trigger airbags.”

The Commission noted that the deployment of the airbags would have prevented injuries to the passengers, especially those seated in the front, and cited Section 16 of the Sale of Goods Act, 1930 (conditions pertaining to the quality of a product) in support of this assertion.

“A customer is not expected to be a physics expert estimating the effects of a collision on theories based on force and velocity,” the statement said.

When a buyer buys a car with airbags, they often believe that they will deploy in the event of an accident. When I purchased the ~50.50 lakh BMW in 2019, I had the same notion, Teja told TNIE.

The commission has mandated that the BMW abide by the directive within 45 days of April 8; if not, interest at the rate of 6% annually would be applied to the compensation sum.