Automotive airbags are key safety devices that aim to reduce injuries and mortality in the event of motor vehicle accidents. These rapidly-inflating cushions act to soften the blow of an impact, catching occupants of the vehicle and preventing them from hitting hard parts of the vehicle’s interior.Airbags are rigorously tested to perform as faultlessly as possible under all conditions. However, no system is perfect, and every automotive component has an expected service life. The question is—how old is too old when it comes to airbags? The answer is not exactly straightforward.What’s My Age Again?Airbags first hit the market in the 1970s, but it was in the 1980s that the technology became more widely available on mass market models. Ford was a trailblazer in the US market, fitting airbags to select models like the Tempo from 1985 onwards. Credit: Ford Heritage ArchiveEvery given component of a car has a lifespan. A set of quality spark plugs might last 100,000 km in service, while an air filter might be rated for a year or two before replacement is due. In some cases, automakers might deem a given component to last the life of the car. A great example is “lifetime” rated transmission fluid, where the automaker doesn’t expect it to ever need to be changed. That’s not because the fluid lasts forever, but because they expect the car to be scrapped before the fluid is no longer serviceable. Oftentimes, automakers have gotten this guess wrong, and owners find themselves struggling to change the fluid on transmissions that were never designed to allow such replacement. Generally, this attitude is because automakers aren’t incentivised to consider how their vehicles run in the years after the factory warranty has run out.As far as airbags are concerned, they’ve generally been treated as a component that is expected to last the life of the vehicle. If the engine is running and the doors are still on, the airbags should be fine, goes the thinking. Barring exceptional cases like Takata’s deadly malfunctioning airbags, of course. The problem is that what an automaker considers a vehicle’s useful lifetime is often not the same as the owner’s own opinion. A luxury automaker doesn’t think you’ll still be driving today’s newest model in ten year’s time, while a vintage car enthusiast might still be happily driving a 30-year-old car in 2026.We know, just from observation, that airbags in ten-year-old cars are still perfectly functional in the vast majority of cases. However, we’re now getting to the point where there are cars with airbags that are hitting their 30th and 40th birthdays, and they’re still on the road. Owners of these vehicles are starting to wonder if they can trust the somewhat explosive devices that are, in many cases, aimed directly at the face.A steering wheel from an airbag-equipped model of the NA Mazda Miata. The popular sports car is notable for being equipped with airbags in some territories, like California, while featuring no airbags in areas where they were not yet required in the early 1990s. Credit: @toasty.cx, providedAirbags were first developed in the 1960s, and reached production cars in the mid-1970s. They would grow in prominence in the 1980s, before eventually becoming mandatory in major markets like the US in the mid-1990s. Take any automaker producing a car with airbags in 1985, for example. It probably wasn’t particularly concerned with how that car would perform in 2026. A fair call, perhaps, given the vast majority of vehicles built in that year have since left the roads, but it’s an active concern for those who do own the dwindling members of the class of 1985.The problem we have in this regard is that, for most vehicles, we just don’t know how the airbags hold up over those sort of timeframes. This sort of testing is a difficult thing to do. There are accelerated aging techniques that can be used to test some types of equipment, but they’re not always applicable and are an estimation at best. If you’re building a car in 1985, you can make some assumptions do some calculations that suggest your airbag will last for a given timespan after manufacture, and that’s about as good as it gets.We do have some data on hand. It’s limited, but it gives us a guide as to how airbags are performing in the wild. In the mid-1990s, IIHS tested a couple of 1973 Chevrolet Impalas in and found that these ancient, early airbags performed okay in a simple crash test. Technology has only improved since then, so one would assume many of our more modern airbags would perform well over even longer time periods. Meanwhile, queries made to manufacturers by Edmunds indicated that the industry widely believes older airbags to be still functional over extended time periods. Hence the lack of service intervals or mandated regular inspections for these devices.A Mercedes-Benz steering wheel from 1992, cut away to show the airbag assembly. Note the folded airbag material sitting in front of the propellant charges. Mercedes-Benz has stated that prior to January 1992, its airbags had a 15-year service life. Newer airbags in vehicles manufactured after this date are not required to be replaced, according to the manufacturer. Credit: Mercedes-Benz archivesNotably, Mercedes-Benz is one automaker that spells out airbag lifetimes quite clearly—and not every example from the German automaker gets a “good forever” rating. Speaking to Hagerty, the automaker noted that the company’s earlier airbags in vehicles sold prior to January 1992 are rated for a service life of just 15 years. Those vehicles would have been due for airbag replacements in 2007 at the latest. Replacement dates were listed on stickers placed on the vehicle on these models. However, Mercedes-Benz vehicles produced after this date have airbags with no service life limit, and are “not required to be replaced.” This, of course, does not count the limited number of models built with Takata airbags, which were subject to recall just as were models from many other automakers.The industry line is that old airbags are fine. We also don’t have a lot of evidence to suggest that airbags in popular 1980s and 1990s models are hurting anyone just yet. For those reasons, if you do have an older car, a wise gambler would probably say you’re better off leaving it alone rather than being all paranoid and ripping the airbag out.Can We Learn More?Modern airbag systems are expected to last the lifetime of the vehicle, which is, unfortunately, a poorly defined amount of time. Regardless, airbags in older vehicles are yet to prove dangerous en masse, outside of outlier events like the Takata scandal. Credit: BMWVague assertions that airbags are mostly okay forever may not assuage your fears when you’re sitting behind the window of your kinda-junky 1999 Honda Prelude on a sunny day in 2041. Sure, the NHTSA isn’t ringing alarm bells about 90s cars maiming people in highway accidents just yet, but who knows what another decade or two will bring. Is there anything more to be done?Sitting here in 2026, we could try and collect data today on how old airbags are holding up. However, there are some logistical hurdles that would make this relatively difficult. You could purchase a bunch of airbags from scrapped cars that are 30 or 40 years old, test fire them in an instrumented laboratory, and determine if they operated safely. Or you could simply run crash tests with old cars. However, such an effort would be hugely expensive and time-intensive. Beyond the engineering staff required and the cost of purchasing old vehicles, to get useful data, you’d have to test lots of cars. If you test a single 1984 Ford Tempo and find the airbags are bad after 40 years, you don’t really know if it’s one bad example or if the airbags in all the cars are bad. You’d really need to test a bunch of Ford Tempos to get a better idea, perhaps 10 or even 100 cars. Even then, the data would still be very limited in application. You’d have found that Ford Tempo airbags from 1984 were okay, but what about when Ford switched to a new inflator design in 1989? What about the larger Ford models, or any of the thousands of other airbags in other models from other manufacturers? Each design could perform differently over time, based on conditions of manufacture, how well the airbags are sealed, and the type of propellant used.The airbag inflators are not the only components that must remain stable and functional over decades. Similarly, the control modules responsible for firing the airbags must also work otherwise the airbags themselves are useless. Credit: BMW The issue doesn’t even stop with the airbags themselves. They must be triggered by a dedicated electronic module which detects a vehicle impact and determines when and how to fire the airbags in the vehicle. One thing we do know is that a lot of 40-year-old electronics start to fail when their capacitors leak or dry out, to say nothing of other age-related failure modes due to vibration or heat cycles. For an airbag to work, both the inflator and the control system need to be fully functional.Ultimately, you’ll never quite know if your airbags are going to work until they do… or don’t. But the best indications we have are that the majority of automotive airbags are proving functional and reliable over long periods of time. There may be a day sometime soon when we learn that those old airbags from the 1980s and 1990s are no longer to be trusted, and that will be the time to start dealing more carefully with vehicles of that vintage. For now, though, it seems the safest move is to leave well enough alone, and trust that even a decades-old airbag will still do the job safely and effectively.