Verified answer

In short - you can't get a suit going with Mazda.

Airbags will deploy when there's a front or rear collision, or if there's a side collision where the sensors detect sufficient force to deploy. These are designed through front and offset-front accident modeling.

Your accident is clearly a side-impact that did not hit, nor deploy ANY sensors in the front or rear section of your car. If you look closely at your pictures, the side impact bars in your doors DID in fact, prevent a serious ingress into the passenger compartment. One can only imagine what would have happened to an older car that lacked the reinforcements in the doors.

Rather than seeking damages for a properly designed car, you should be thanking Mazda for engineering proper safety equipment into your car to prevent fatalities, even with a solid side-impact. You were driving a compact car that, 15 years ago, would have meant serious occupant injury from a similar accident!

I don't think pursuing a lawsuit is worth it.

What is difficult to tell is the dynamics of the collision, the speed and angle. Front bags deploy on head on collision, while side/door bags would deploy in a T-bone direct side collision, where your car looks to me like you side-swiped something that tore a big gash in the side, which doesn't fit the requirements to trigger either set of bags.

Plus honestly, what are your injuries? If you are not seriously injured and able to write and post these details, possibly it was not necessary that those bags deploy, and there was insufficient G-force to activate any of the airbags. There are conditions where it is cheaper and safer if the bags do not deploy... they really are rockets covered by big plastic bags, you may be hurt by their deployment, so they don't make them to false trigger in too soft a collision. You might be thankful for this rather than threatening to sue... to walk away from one like this should be pleasant enough.

Because of current fears about air bags deploying when not needed, maybe they were not triggered. Was any one in the passenger seat? If not then the computer may not have had that one "Active".

Direction of impact also is a factor in deployment.

So while the damage looks bad, the g forces that were generated were in the wrong direction for the computer to deploy them.

Think about this, I have know of drivers who received severe body harm because air bags deployed.

If every one walked away from this crash, what is the problem, what was the loss?

No loss, no suit.

You gonna use that gas cap? The one on my fiances "3" broke.