Front Air Bag problems of the 2004 Chrysler Pacifica

I decided to report this complaint when I read of a similar incident in a automotive newspaper column. I was traveling on a highway about 50 miles per hour when the passenger airbag in my 2004 Chrysler Pacifica spontaneously deployed. Fortunately my son was sitting in the backseat (or I shudder to think what might have happened to him), and thankfully I was able to keep the vehicle on the road until I could safely pull over. There was no collision that made the bag deploy, nor did I run over anything in the road. The entire dashboard was "fried" in addition to the bag deploying. The car dealer and the representative from Chrysler would not take responsibility--they blamed the auto repair shop that had done some collision work on the car a month earlier. The collision shop said that the work they did was nowhere near anything related to the airbag system. No one could give an explanation for why the airbag had deployed even after they examined the vehicle over a week's time. So, despite their being no rational reason why the airbag would spontaneously deploy, Chrysler still refused to take any responsibility or offer any compensation--in fact they were extremely rude on the phone. My insurance company wouldn't cover the damage and frankly I didn't feel comfortable driving the car even if it had been repaired since there was no guarantee it wouldn't happen again. We were forced to "junk" the car and buy a new/used one. Chrysler is lucky that the deploying airbag didn't cause me to have an accident and that no one was sitting in that seat. Someone could have been seriously injured or even died, but they didn't want to look into or acknowledge the problem. I don't want this to happen to anyone else!.

Vehicle was in park, and the air bags deployed and shattered the front windshield. The mechanic said it looked like a defect in the air bag.