Domestic Tesla was exposed to lack of knee air bags, customer service: does not affect the safety of the whole vehicle so it is not installed

IT Home January 9 news, Tesla previously said that its vehicles can achieve 5-star safety of the whole vehicle and 5-star safety performance of each category, confident of achieving the highest standards in the industry.

Recently, some Tesla owners said that domestic Teslas seem to be suspected of following the local customs in some aspects. Although the industry said that Tesla models will be equal in safety performance regardless of the configuration of the version, he found that his domestic (Shanghai Gigafactory) Tesla Model3 model seems to lack a knee airbag structure.

The owner said that the Tesla crash test video and other materials he obtained showed that the overseas version of Tesla lacked knee airbags, so he wanted to confirm whether the domestic version of Tesla was equipped with knee airbags.

First of all, he removed the cover plate under the main co-driver of the vehicle, and unfortunately found that there was no shadow of the knee airbag in both parts, and although there was a plastic cover inside, there was no airbag installed in fact.

To further confirm, the owner dialed Tesla's 400 customer service number. The other party said: Knee airbags do not affect the safety of the whole vehicle, in the time of car accident, the knee airbags on the safety of the vehicle is not high, the entire domestic series of Teslas do not have.

It is reported that the knee airbag is usually configured under the dashboard, when encountering a collision accident, the airbag will automatically pop out, the purpose is to reduce the damage to the driver's legs, form a collision buffer area, but also help to alleviate the driver's chest and abdomen impact force.

IT Home understands that airbags are an important passive safety device in the car, and many consumers and governments are also very concerned about the configuration of airbags. For example, the United States passed a federal bill in the last century that required passenger cars manufactured on September 1, 1998, to be fitted with front airbags for the main and co-pilots.

However, there are also data that show that in the current automobile market, most models are still only equipped with main and co-pilot airbags and side airbags. A study released by the National Highway Safety Insurance Association (IIHS) in 2019 showed that the allocation rate of knee airbags continues to increase, but in some accidents, knee airbags not only fail to reduce the safety risk caused by traffic accidents, but increase the risk of injury to members, and finally conclude that knee airbag protection is poor and will look for alternatives.