Carmakers liable to pay damages if airbags don’t deploy, orders Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Deployment of airbags in a car ought to prevent injuries and failure to meet this standard will make carmakers liable to pay damages, said the Supreme Court in a verdict this week awarding damages of ₹3 lakh to a car owner who suffered injuries as the airbags of his Hyundai Creta car failed to open on impact during an accident in 2017.

The court also directed the automobile manufacturer to replace the vehicle, discarding the company’s defence that airbags will open only on frontal impact.

The judgment on Wednesday by a bench of justices Vineet Saran and Aniruddha Bose said, “Deployment of airbags ought to have prevented injuries being caused to those travelling in the vehicle, particularly in the front seat. A consumer is not meant to be an expert in physics to calculate the impact of a collision on the theories based on velocity and force.”

The company argued during hearings that the vehicle was designed to deploy the front airbags only when an impact is sufficiently severe and when the impact angle is less than 30 degrees from the forward longitudinal axis of the vehicle. Both the Delhi consumer court and the national consumer commission previously gave concurrent verdicts holding the carmaker guilty for the injuries.

The bench said: “Ordinarily, a consumer while purchasing a vehicle with airbags would assume that the same would be deployed whenever there is a collision from the front portion of the vehicle.”

Shailender Bhatnagar, who filed the petition, told the court that he bought the car in August 2015 largely due to its security feature of deployment of airbags. The manual did not contain any clause that airbags would not open in every circumstance and there was no clause excluding the manufacturer’s liability. However, in November 2017 when the Creta driven by Bhatnagar on the Delhi-Panipat highway hit a truck, the airbag did not function and he sustained several injuries.

Justice Bose, writing the judgment for the bench said, “The failure to provide an airbag system which would meet the safety standards as perceived by a car buyer of reasonable prudence, in our view, should be subject to punitive damages which can have a deterrent effect.” The top court even upheld the direction of the state and national consumer commissions to direct the company to replace replacement of the car.

The judgment said, “Damages awarded against the appellant (Hyundai) may have gone beyond the actual loss suffered by the respondent (victim) and may not represent the actual loss suffered by him in monetary terms. But the provision of Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 permits awarding punitive damages. Such damages, in our view, can be awarded in the event the defect is found to have the potential to cause serious injury or major loss to the consumer, particularly in respect of safety features of a vehicle.”

The consumer forum earlier divided the compensation under heads of medical expenses and income loss ( ₹2 lakh), mental agony ( ₹50,000) and cost of litigation ( ₹50,000). The national commission’s ruling was delivered on January 5 last year against which Hyundai had filed an appeal before the top court.