If I get in a car accident, and my airbag goes off, and hit me in the face (with glasses on), will wearing my glasses mess up my face worse then if I wasn’t?
Probably, it’ll probably cut/bruise your face more then if you weren’t. But no where near the damage you’d get if you had your glasses on and your face slammed into the windshield.
Or the steering wheel or dash.
I have been in a car accident in which my airbag went off, and I had my glasses on. I had no injuries to my face – but I was also wearing my seat belt, so my face may not have come into direct contact with the bag. I estimate that impact was at about 40 mph.
Airbags are surprisingly violent. A friend of mine was badly burned by his in a low speed accident, mostly on his wrists. He would have been better off in that case had the thing not gone off. They’ve also been known to kill children, which is why you now have a switch to disable the thing on the passenger side.
Airbags are so horrible in slow speed accidents that they definately don’t give me a warm fuzzy as far as safety devices are concerned. On the other hand, on a high speed impact the airbag just might be the only thing that stops you from getting killed. For very violent crashes, they do in fact do what they are advertised to do, which is save your life.
I know I’ve read one story of a small girl having her neck broken by an air bag. A brief web search didn’t find that case, but I did find this link:
http://www.safetyforum.com/fcars/cases.html
It lists two airbag incidents. The first one was that the airbag “exploded into child passenger” with the result listed as “death” (no other details). The second incident was that the airbag failed to deploy, and the result was “death of driver and severe injuries to passengers.”
I was in an accident where I was wearing glasses and got hit in the face with an airbag. (There were significant scrapes on my cheek.) Nothing major happened, except that I had to replace my glasses because they’d been knocked off my face and broken.
Robin