37 Trial Lawyer • Summer 2023 Blaine Clooten By Blaine Clooten It was over in the blink of an eye. Sarah was fighting for her life after a head-on collision. She didn’t survive. After registering for college courses, Sarah was driving home on a clear summer day in late August 2017. The ground was dry, and traffic was light along a rural two-lane Eastern Oregon highway. Sarah recently graduated high school and was excited to start higher education. In high school, she was on the soccer team and had a “B” average. Her school only had 48 other graduating seniors, so she was well-known and well-loved in her small community. Tom, a 19-year-old, was driving the opposite direction of Sarah in a 1996 Cadillac Seville. He was returning home after working the back-to-back of a double shift at a nearby agricultural plant. Witnesses tell state troopers that Tom’s Cadillac swerved into the opposite lane and struck Sarah’s vehicle head-on. Through discovery, I’ll learn from crash data from Sarah’s vehicle she was driving the speed limit and she was properly belted in. It is immediately obvious the driver’s side airbag was not deployed, but the passenger’s side was. I’ll learn Sarah’s airbag failed to deploy due to a defective clockspring coil mechanism. Witnesses tell OSP troopers Sarah, “never left her lane.” Many pictures taken at the scene corroborate this fact. The life flight medic will write in his report that Sarah begged, “I want to go home” with her last breath. Thirty-five minutes after the crash, Sarah succumbed to her injuries. Her family was devastated. She left behind loving parents, older brothers and a younger sister. In addition to the event data recorder (EDR), Sarah’s attorneys will rely on a biomechanical expert. A key issue will be differentiating between injuries sustained to the lower body versus injuries sustained to the spine and neck, and specifically whether Sarah would have died but for the airbag not deploying. A crucial component to this case came down to understanding the information on the EDR. The idea of this article is to familiarize practitioners with the fundamentals of the airbag control module (ACM) and demystify some of the key concepts. This was the process we went through at the beginning of Sarah's wrongful death case. In this case, we worked with the defense attorneys so all parties would have representatives present while the event data recorder information was downloaded. Each party then employed their own experts to analyze the data. All in the details To begin with, it’s helpful to have some basic terminology. For instance, an ACM is a small box, generally located at or near the center of mass of a passenger vehicle. It monitors various systems, such as crush sensors, and/or change in velocity, in the car. The system waits for a certain threshold to be broken to deploy the airbags. An EDR is part of the airbag control module that will save pre- and post-crash data if the vehicle is in a crash. A car doesn’t exactly have a “black box” like an aircraft, but it’s similar. In an aircraft the black box’s’ sole purpose is to record audio, radio and plane configurations in case the plane crashes and an analysis of the crash is needed. In a passenger vehicle, the purpose of the ACM is to determine if an airbag should or should not deploy. If the airbag control See Black Box p 38 Airbag Control Module: Demystifying the Black box of car crash litigation
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