According to a study by The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) nearly 1 in every 5 fatal accidents involves a vehicle with a missing airbag. The study looked at 1,446 fatal accidents between 2001 and 2006 and found 255 instances – nearly 18 percent – of vehicles that were lacking airbags because they had not been replaced following an accident. In addition, the agency found crashes where airbags had been improperly installed and thus failed to deploy.

The study found that some of the cases are fraud, while others result from botched repair jobs from unskilled technicians. In a report from NPR late last year, some dealers and repair shops stuffed air bag compartments with aluminum cans, packaging peanuts, or even paper. The consequences of this are obviously very dangerous and have potentially killed 1000's of lives that could have been saved. What is even more outrageous is that currently there are no laws preventing dealers from doing this and no one tracks the amount times this happens.

TheCD's take: Since a lot of young driver buy used cars, I felt the need to post this story as soon as I heard about it. Though this may go without saying, please DO NOT purchase a car if you know it does not have airbags. If you know your car has been involved in a collision get the air bags inspected as it could be a life or death decision. If you don't know your car's history get a Carfax vehicle report , they are very inexpensive. And finally, if you have just purchased a used car and see the airbag light on, or have a gut feeling that it has been in an accident get it checked out.

Source: NPR and Autoblog