Where are the airbags on a Nissan Qashqai located?

By Stuart Johnston

The Nissan Qashqai has been an excellent seller in South Africa and a facelifted version with new nose styling and interior appointments broke cover here at the beginning of 2018. Here's more on the Qashqai's number of airbags, and where they're situated.

The Qashqai boasts multiple airbags & excellent standard safety spec

The Qashqai features an impressive safety specification that includes ABS braking, electronic brake force distribution (EBD), brake-assist (which increases the force of braking to maximum in an emergency), stability control, HIll Start Assist, and, in the top models, aids such as blind-spot detection.

The Nissan Qashqai is available in four  trim spec levels, these being the Visia, Acenta, Acenta Plus and the Tekna. All these models come with six airbags as standard equipment.

The airbags are located as follows:

*The driver’s airbag, located as per usual in the centre of the steering wheel;

*the front passenger airbag, located in the dashboard, in this case on the upper, horizontal section of the dashboard;

* the side airbags, which are located in the out-facing sides of the front seat backrests;

*and the curtain airbags, located at the point where the central door pillar (known as the B-pillar in car-construction terminology) meets the roof line.

Some, or all of the airbags may deploy in an accident

Airbags are designed to deploy when sensors in the car’s bodywork detect an impact. For this reason, in an accident, some or all of these airbags may deploy, depending on the area of impact on the car. In the case of passenger side airbags, these will only deploy when a passenger is located in the front seat, and is detected by the safety-restraint system sensors.

Airbag replacement must be Nissan-approved

Airbags are expensive items to replace, and recently some private companies have started up in South Africa doing airbag replacement sourcing airbags privately from overseas suppliers. But in the case of this Nissan Qashqai, as it is still a new model, airbag replacement after an accident will have to be carried out by a Nissan-approved panel repair shop.

Non-approved replacement will invalidate the warranty

This is a condition of all manufacturer’s new-car warranties, where any non-approved work on the car will invalidate the warranty.

In the case of the 2018 MY Nissan Qashqai, the warranty is an impressive six years/150 000 km