2005 Buick Rendezvous Owner's Manual - Page 79

When Should an Airbag Inflate? The driver's and right front passenger's frontal airbags are designed to inflate in moderate to severe frontal or near-frontal crashes. But they are designed to inflate only if the impact exceeds a predetermined deployment threshold. Deployment thresholds take into account a variety of desired deployment and non-deployment events and are used to predict how severe a crash is likely to be in time for the airbags to inflate and help restrain the occupants. Whether your frontal airbags will or should deploy is not based on how fast your vehicle is traveling. It depends largely on what you hit, the direction of the impact and how quickly your vehicle slows down. In addition, your vehicle has "dual stage" frontal airbags, which adjust the restraint according to crash severity. Your vehicle is equipped with electronic frontal sensors which help the sensing system distinguish between a moderate and a more severe frontal impact. For moderate frontal impacts, these airbags inflate at a level less than full deployment. For more severe frontal impacts, full deployment occurs. If the front of your vehicle goes straight into a wall that does not move or deform, the threshold level for the reduced deployment is about 12 to 20 mph (19 to 33 km/h), and the threshold level for a full deployment is about 21 to 25 mph (34 to 40 km/h). (The threshold level can vary, however, with specific vehicle design, so that it can be somewhat above or below this range.) 1-73