Modified Camaro Blows Side Airbags At 140mph After Having Stupidly Loud Exhaust Fitted

Airbags are amazing devices that are responsible for saving countless lives the world over since entering the automotive mainstream. But, they’re not so great on the very rare occasions they go off when they’re not supposed to, as shown here.

The spontaneous deployment of curtain airbags in this video (at the 10min 20sec mark, if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing) is a particularly unusual case. It’s on a modified Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, and the uploader reckons it was down to the stupidly loud exhaust he’d just had fitted.

It was a diverter system which - at the flick of a switch - dumps all of the gasses out of a separate pipe not far from the manifold, bypassing the rest of the pipework. As you can imagine, that results in the 6.2-litre supercharged V8 in this Camaro becoming shockingly loud, and further investigation revealed that the airbag sensor lives right near the diverter pipe. Sound is - after all - just a bunch of vibrations, so the theory is the vibrations were harsh enough to trigger the sensor.

Of course we don’t know for sure if that was the cause, but whatever set them off, it’s good to see that (thanks partly to the roll cage) neither of the car’s occupants were harmed by the deployment. Oh, and obviously we can’t condone doing 140mph on a public road…