42,032 complaints in the federal database report that somebody was hurt. In 11,447 of them, no crash occurred.
That is more than one injury report in four, describing a car that injured its occupants while behaving, in the collision sense, perfectly normally.
| Component named | Reports | Injuries |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | 1,493 | 1,793 |
| Air bags | 1,492 | 1,729 |
| Seats | 1,109 | 1,201 |
| Power train | 582 | 689 |
| Electrical system | 468 | 566 |
Second on that list is the airbag, a device that only exists because of crashes, injuring people in their absence.
An airbag that fires on its own
An inadvertent deployment is exactly what it sounds like. The car is being driven normally, or in some reports is stationary, and the airbag fires.
At deployment an airbag inflates in around 30 milliseconds and does so with enough force to be dangerous at close range. That force is calculated against a body already moving forward in a collision. A driver sitting upright and relaxed takes it differently, and the injuries reported are burns, facial fractures and hearing damage rather than the chest loading a crash produces.
These have driven real recalls. Airbags account for 11% of all complaints in the record, and inadvertent deployment is a recurring cause among them.
Seats, and the ones that fall over backwards
1,109 reports name the seat. The dominant description is a seatback that collapsed rearward, usually during acceleration, sometimes while stationary and being rear-ended at low speed.
A seatback that gives way puts the occupant's head where the rear passenger is sitting, which is why a number of these reports involve two injured people from one failure.
1,223 of them were fires
Among the 11,447 no-crash injury reports, 1,223 involve fire. That is where the burns come from, and it connects directly to what the fire complaints show elsewhere: 95% of reported vehicle fires involve no collision.
A fire in a moving car injures people during the exit rather than the event. Several reports describe doors that would not unlock once the electrical system was compromised.
Why this matters for how you read safety data
Crash ratings measure the crash. They are rigorous, standardised, and they say nothing about a component injuring somebody on a Tuesday morning in traffic.
That entire category lives in the complaint record and in recalls, not in star ratings. It is also, unlike crash performance, something that gets fixed for free once acknowledged: a defect that injures people without a collision is exactly the kind that produces a recall campaign.
The practical step is the same as ever and takes a minute: run the VIN and see whether anything is open on the car. An unclaimed recall is the only part of this data you can act on directly.
Frequently asked questions
How can a car injure someone without crashing?
Of 42,032 injury complaints, 11,447 involved no collision. The most commonly named components are the structure, airbags, and seats — including airbags that deployed without an impact and seatbacks that collapsed rearward during normal acceleration.
How often do airbags deploy without a crash?
Airbags are named in 1,492 of the no-crash injury reports, accounting for 1,729 injuries. Because deployment force is designed against a body already moving forward in a collision, an unexpected deployment tends to produce burns, facial injuries and hearing damage.
Do crash safety ratings cover this?
No. Star ratings and IIHS tests measure what happens during a collision. Injuries caused by a component failing in normal driving appear only in complaint records and recalls, which is why checking open recalls on a VIN covers a gap the ratings cannot.
Denis Kataev is a serial solopreneur and the founder of ForCar. With 15+ years in software engineering and 10 years in SEO, he builds data-driven products end to end — backed by a sharp eye for design. At ForCar he mines proprietary vehicle datasets, turning raw numbers into buying advice you can actually trust.
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