Why you should stop putting your legs on the car dashboard

Putting your feet on the dashboard is dangerous and potentially fatal. Upon impact passenger frontal airbags are deployed from inside the dashboard and if your feet are up at the height of the dash your legs will be pushed upward rather than keeping your legs and lower body secured in a seated position.

As soon as Janet would hop into the passenger seat of a car, the mother of three  would lean back and relax with her feet up on the dashboard.

Her husband warned her about the dangerous habit, but Janet didn’t care — it was comfortable.

“All my life I had my legs crossed and my foot on the dash,” Janet told media. “My husband always told me, ‘You’re going to get in a wreck someday, and you’re going to break your legs.'”

Janet assured him he was wrong.

“I’ll put my foot down in time,” she would always reply. 

But two years ago, on August 2, 2015, Janet’s perspective changed completely.

The couple was heading to her parents’ house about 10 kilometres away to pick up her two sons when a car pulled in front of her husband and they T-boned him. Everyone was able to walk away from the scene with scrapes and bruises, except for Janet.

“The airbag went off, throwing my foot up and breaking my nose,” Janet explained. “I was looking at the bottom of my foot facing up at me.”

Janet’s ankle, femur and arm were all broken by the impact.

“Basically my whole right side was broken, and it’s simply because of my ignorance,” Janet said. “I’m not Superman. I couldn’t put my foot down in time.”

Janet underwent several surgeries and weeks of physical therapy. It took her over a month to start walking again. 

Two years later, she’s still facing obstacles.

“I can’t do my career as an EMS. I can’t lift patients anymore,” she explained. “I can’t stand more than 4 hours at a time. Once I’m at that 4-hour mark I’m in tears.”

Now the mom is using her story to warn others.

“I keep telling everybody, you don’t want this life,” she said. “You don’t want the pain and agony every day.”

Airbags deploy between 100 and 220 KMPH. If you ride with your feet on the dash and you’re involved in an accident, the airbag may send your knees through your eye sockets.

If there wasn’t an airbag at all, Janet predicts her injuries could have been even worse.

“It could have done so much more damage. It did make it break my nose, but I could’ve hit the dash a whole lot harder without that airbag,” she said.

As she continues to recover, Janet plans on telling her story to even more members of her community — and she hopes people get the message.

“If I can save one person from doing this and they’re not going through it, that would be wonderful,” Janet said.