Bob Wertz

An incredibly strange accident, but my wife and son are fine.

Two weeks ago, Liz and Ryan were driving to school early in the morning in a midst of a rain storm when a pine tree blew into their path and impaled their 2020 Buick Envision. The tree was about 24 feet tall, passed through the headlight, through the engine, through the firewall, through the dashboard and extended several feet into the passenger cabin, between the front headrests.

By some miracle, Liz needed only four stitches on her hand, caused by a ring that had to be cut off her thumb. And my 12-year-old son, who was in the front passenger seat, was completely untouched. Numerous people from firefighters and policemen to tow truck drivers and insurance adjusters have said they’ve never seen anything like it.

After people processes the shock of the accident, and the relief that everyone is okay, most people look at the picture of the interior and have the same reaction: “Wait, why didn’t the airbags deploy?”

The airbags did not deploy. And everyone has a theory about why.

• Theory #1: The airbags didn’t deploy because they failed. The airbags should have deployed, but must have been defective. Most people who believe this want me to share a picture of the damage with Buick and complain. “They should have to compensate you” is a common refrain. “You should sue."¹

• Theory #2: The airbags didn’t deploy because the tree missed the sensors. This theory was floated by the tow truck operator. Because the tree went through the headlight where there are no airbag sensors, the airbags didn’t deploy. In this scenario, the headlights are essentially a weakness in the car’s safety design.

• Theory #3: The airbags worked as designed. They should not have gone off because the accident wasn’t a typical head on collision. The car was immediately spun around in a lateral motion. The physics of the accident were weird and disorienting. It’s worth noting that my wife’s iPhone’s crash detection didn’t trigger either despite the fact that it was thrown to the floor from the center console. Several people have theorized that the force of the airbags could have made injuries worse.

My gut reaction is that the airbags behaved as designed, but I also could understand if the car wasn’t engineered to withstand such a strange, one-in-a-million accident.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t know how airbag systems work. Most people don’t, but that hasn’t stopped us all from speculating. We imagine the airbag systems in modern cars to be this protective cloud that inflates around us, but I know it’s more complicated than that. We want to know why the airbags didn’t deploy because we want to be reassured that if it happens to us, we’ll be safe. But it’s just not that simple. There are too many variables.

We’ll never know why the airbags didn’t deploy, but Liz and Ryan are lucky to be alive and I’m incredibly thankful for that.

Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.