This is something that many people have neither heard of nor even thought about. When the front airbags are triggered, which can happen because of a mere bump to the vehicle at speeds as low as 12mph, those airbags [explode outwards] at between 165 and 200mph. They are most certainly not nice fluffy cushions, and if you have one or both of your feet up on the dashboard at the time, the results will be serious and can even kill you.
While these type of incidents frequently don’t get much coverage in the media, details of one [were published… on] August 8, 2017, when CBS News ran the story of Audra Tatum, a mother of three, from Georgia.
Ms Tatum has asked for her own injuries to be publicized in the hope that other people will be discouraged from making the same bad and potentially fatal mistake.
One thing she freely admits is that her husband had repeatedly warned her of the dangers of putting her feet up on the dash but that she had always told him that if anything bad started to happen she would be able to put her feet down in time. However, having suffered a broken ankle, leg, arm and nose as a result of what she did, her take now on those earlier, frankly impossible promises is that she’s not Superman, and couldn’t possibly have got her foot down in time. Indeed, she blames her injuries entirely on her own, earlier “ignorance.”
So have you now been warned? Injuries and deaths from this cause are amongst the very easiest to avoid. It’s only a case of keeping you feet and legs down, out of the path of the passenger airbag.
Please feel free to send the URL of this page to your friends, or post it in social media, so that more people wise-up to this potentially horrible scenario.
Read here: This is Why You Shouldn’t Put Your Feet on the Dashboard, from CBS News.
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(The text of this article is copyright. It was first posted in August 2017, at Advanced Drivers of North America, and is reproduced here by permission.)