I have a question about the airbags in a civic, the civic we own got wrecked and there was a horrible smell of gun powder after the wreck but the airbags weren't deployed. Does anyone know if the airbags might have been faulty or is the smell something else. There was also a little bit of smoke in the car after the wreck. Any advice would be great.

 

Welcome to the forum,the older air bags did use a gun powder to deploy, since then they use Sodium Azide,the smell will go away with time, usually during the summer with the windows open frequently about a month.

 

airbags do have a shelf life there not a lifetime part. there was a major recall on some of the 7th generation models because they were packed with to much explosives and would send metal shrapnel into the driver.

 

Thanks for the input, this is a 2007 civic so I don't think the shelf life would be up on this vehicle. But come to find out it was the igniters that went off but the airbags didn't deploy. In my mind this is a huge safety issue, maybe we just had a special case and other civic airbags work fine. I did call honda about this issue and they said that they were going to submit some papers to R&D and their engineering to look into this. Being an engineer I would want to actually look at this car to determine why this happened. Not sure how they could reproduce the error unless it is common in these vehicles.

 

I think you need to reset your airbag, then it can work well.