A vehicle’s Passenger Presence System “PPS” is used to monitor the type of occupant that is sitting in the front passenger seat to determine whether to enable or suppress the deployment of the front passenger airbag. The PPS is designed to reduce injuries to smaller occupants from the deployment of airbags by utilizing sensors in the front passenger seat to gather information related to the occupant’s weight and the kind of pressure placed on the seat. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208 requires that the system enable the passenger airbag when a person weighs between 103 and 113 pounds and is between 55 and 59 inches tall is seated in the front passenger seat. However, the PPS can fail to correctly determine that an adult is seated in the front passenger seat, and in turn, can improperly deactivate the front airbag, increasing the risk of serious or fatal injury in a car collision.

During the crash, if the driver’s front airbag properly deploys allowing the driving to walk away with minor injuries, but the front passenger airbag fails to deploy resulting in the adult passenger sustaining serious injuries, there has most likely been a defect in the PPS. Investigation begins with crash data retrieval “CDR” to determine if the subject collision was recorded as a “deployment” event and properly commanded the vehicle to deploy both airbags. If the CDR shows that the PPS has misclassified an adult front seat passenger as a child which results in a serious injury to the adult passenger, there is a potential claim for defective failure of the PPS provided that front passenger had on a seatbelt, had a reasonable seat position, and the CDR shows that the vehicle’s longitudinal delta-v was above the threshold for deployment for the airbag.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.208