23rd Aug 2010, 14:47
I think you were a little fast with your comment.
1. It was "nearly" a head-on collision. You construe this to be a perfect head on with a car of equal speed and mass. None of this was stated in the review.
2. "The two cars hitting each other would be equal to one car hitting a wall at 90 MPH." That is a common miss-conception. What counts it Newton's third law, the action-reaction law. What comes out of it is that 2 objects of the same mass colliding head on at equal speed is the same as one object hitting a solid concrete wall. There is no magic doubling of the speed.
29th Aug 2010, 13:20
Two vehicles hitting at a slight offset angle might not trigger the airbags. I hit a Toyota Tundra at an angle and my airbags deployed but the Tundra driver's did not. Also, the impact of hitting a vehicle head-on at 45 mph is nothing like hitting a wall at 45 mph because cars crumple and absorb huge amounts of energy. Besides, if you are wearing your seat belts the air bags are not as necessary.
Ford builds very safe cars. The new Fiesta got the highest safety rating in its class because of its higher quality materials and better design.
As a Fusion owner who has driven a Honda I would drive nothing but a Ford or GM product now. Modern domestics are the world's best cars. Our Fusion is absolutely flawless and I feel safer in it at 100mph than I did in our Honda at 50. The latest ratings put Ford ahead of all Japanese car companies in build quality.
22nd Feb 2012, 15:10
I was in an accident as well. The airbag(s) did not deploy in this instance either. I spun off of the highway and hit a tree going 55mph. The tree stopped my car on the front driver's side. The tree was big enough that it stretched from the front of my car to the driver's door. I don't know at what angle the car has to hit another object just right or how fast your car has to be going to make the airbags deploy. I, for one, am glad they didn't deploy. It probably would have done more harm than good.
And as embarrassing as it is to admit, I did not have my seat belt on. So as far as the commenter who said if you didn't have your seat belt on, the airbags would deploy, I think this accident debunked that statement. I have to if I was driving another car, I probably wouldn't have just been able to walk away from the accident. The Ford Fusion saved my life.
23rd Feb 2012, 09:37
Around 30,000 people die from car accidents on our highways every year. Many of those from not wearing a seat belt. How you survived is beyond me.
Also, I have been in two serious accidents in my life, and both times the airbags went off. Why your airbag did not go off when the front of the car was hit seems very unusual to me.
In the area I live...there is not a week goes by where someone has been in an accident, and dies from being ejected from the car, from not wearing a seat belt.
23rd Feb 2012, 17:40
I couldn't agree more with comment 13:20. As a former Honda driver, I now own a 2006 Ford Fusion, and like 13:20, I feel twice as safe in the far better built Ford. The build quality is far better than the Honda, and the ride and handling are also much better. There is no question that the Fusion is better than anything Japan has to offer, and we are now staunch Ford fans. No more poorly built Japanese tin for us.
25th Feb 2012, 09:52
"Hondas and Toyotas are better"
Yeah, until a real car like a Caprice or Crown Vic shows up to flatten them.
25th Feb 2012, 12:20
According to every reviewing source, the Fusion is a better, more reliable car than Camry or Accord. All the way back to 2006 it is ranked "much better than average" by Consumer Reports, and J.D. Powers ranks used Fusions a better buy for reliability than the Camry or Accord.
I own a 2006 Fusion, and it is certainly far better in every respect than our previous imports. No more cheaply built Japanese cars in this family... EVER.
22nd Aug 2010, 12:16
These airbags most certainly did malfunction. The original reviewer stated they were in a head-on collision. Now they didn't state with what, but let's assume that whatever they hit was also going 45 MPH. The two cars hitting each other would be equal to one car hitting a wall at 90 MPH. And that's in a perfect case scenario where both cars were going exactly the same speed and weighed exactly the same. If this person hit something heavier and moving at a greater speed, then the impact would be even worse. 45 MPH should be enough to deploy the airbags, but 90 MPH is without question enough force to trigger the airbags. This is obviously a malfunction. And it's just one more reason I'll never buy another Ford.