Pictures would be great. I'm not a gore seeker but I work in a body shop and I see a lot of that kind of thing.

An instinct is to block your face from the collision. Unfortunately the airbags really fly out, enough to break the windshield. Definitely going as far back from the dashboard as is practical, is a good idea. The passenger airbag is a big one and takes up a lot of space.

It's hard to say how it would've panned out, if the car hadn't had airbags. Sometimes in non-SRS cars, the occupants have serious complications from chest injuries where the belts pull. There isn't a good measure of what would've happened without them. Sadly there are injuries related to airbag deployment. Even so, I'm a firm believer in SRS technology. It does add ridiculous amounts of money to the bottom line of both cars, and repair bills. There is the risk of injury, and in lesser collisions you stand the chance of being injured more by airbags than by the wreck itself. But if you're in "the big one", that is a good thing to have working for you. I have seen some really gruesome 850 wrecks, and the passenger compartments have been nearly intact, across the board. The worst one I've seen is an S70 that hit a tree at 70mph (I know more about this than just having seen the wrecked car...)

In that case, all occupants survived with non life-threatening injuries.

Hopefully your girlfriend will have a speedy recovery. I wish her the best.
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Chris Herbst
1992 745, 68k

And others:
93 944, 150k
90 245, 110k
88 744, 160k
87 245, 185k