What's that deafening pop under my dashboard?

About 2 months ago I rolled my 2001 Dodge Caravan into a tree. (Yeah, that was really stupid.) I left the parking brake off and ran in the house to get something and …Anyway: the airbags did not deploy, even though I managed to do about $4K worth of damage to the front end. (Didn’t even hurt the tree.) About a month later, I’m driving at night with a friend, and there’s a deafening pop from under the dashboard. Each of us thought the other one had pulled a gun for a second there; then I thought I’d had a blowout. Nope. Car ran fine, nothing was unusual. Just the really, really loud pop. No problems since. Do you think this has something to do with the airbags? I mean, it was weird that I managed to damage the car that badly and they did not deploy at the time of the impact. I’m thinking maybe something’s not right under there, and I’m driving without functional airbags.

If your airbags are actually non-functional, the airbag warning light on your dashboard should be lit up. However, since this is not something to take chances with, I would suggest that you have the airbag system checked–just in case.