I think that this is the key argument fir the deaths caused. But, I was under the impression that the effectiveness of air bags compared to their hazards was coming into question in testing anyway. a seat belt saves many more lives than an airbag?
Somewhat related anecdote, related to me by an acquaintance who works at a major US crash testing facility:
I don't know about now, but, once upon a time, not too long ago, US safety standards included crash tests where the dummies were not wearing seat belts. This naturally leads to cars sold in the US having air bags that are tuned slightly differently, so that they are less likely to cause injuries to people not wearing seat belts. Unfortunately, doing this decreases their ability to protect the vast majority (nowadays) of people who do use their seat belts.
> Air bags have saved more lives than safety belts, haven't they
Not by a long shot - seat belts reduce the chance of death by 60-70% across all crashes. Airbags reduce the chance of death by 15% in frontal collisions, and very little for other types[1]. The airbag isn’t going to much good if you’ve been ejected from the car.
> Air bags have saved more lives than safety belts, haven't they?
That depends on how you count: no life saved by an airbag would be saved without airbag AND safety belt. An airbag alone saves no lives.
And I still doubt the airbag+belt combination made a bigger dent in the statistic than the introduction of the safety belt did (Although it's hard to compare due to completely different time periods)
> This must once have been true of seatbelts too, before all the experiments that were done with dummies and cadavers.
Surprisingly enough, it was true of airbags after those experiments too: in the late '80s and early '90s, it was noticed that the airbag fatality rate was shockingly high compared to what had been projected, so they went back to the drawing boards and revised the designs. A quote from a RAND study on autonomous cars:
> This tension produced "a standoff between airbag proponents and the automakers that resulted in contentious debates, several court cases, and very few airbags" (Wetmore, 2004, p. 391). In 1984, the US DOT passed a ruling requiring vehicles manufactured after 1990 to be equipped with some type of passive restraint system (e.g., air bags or automatic seat belts) (Wetmore, 2004); in 1991, this regulation was amended to require air bags in particular in all automobiles by 1999 (Pub. L. No. 102-240). The mandatory performance standards in the FMVSS further required air bags to protect an unbelted adult male passenger in a head-on, 30 mph crash. Additionally, by 1990, the situation had changed dramatically, and air bags were being installed in millions of cars. Wetmore attributes this development to three factors: First, technology had advanced to enable air-bag deployment with high reliability; second, public attitude shifted, and safety features became important factors for consumers; and, third, air bags were no longer being promoted as replacements but as supplements to seat belts, which resulted in a sharing of responsibility between manufacturers and passengers and lessened manufacturers' potential liability (Wetmore, 2004). While air bags have certainly saved many lives, they have not lived up to original expectations: In 1977, NHTSA estimated that air bags would save on the order of 9,000 lives per year and based its regulations on these expectations (Thompson, Segui-Gomez, and Graham, 2002). Today, by contrast, NHTSA calculates that air bags saved 8,369 lives in the 14 years between 1987 and 2001 (Glassbrenner, undated). Simultaneously, however, it has become evident that air bags pose a risk to many passengers, particularly smaller passengers, such as women of small stature, the elderly, and children. NHTSA (2008a) determined that 291 deaths were caused by air bags between 1990 and July 2008, primarily due to the extreme force that is necessary to meet the performance standard of protecting the unbelted adult male passenger. Houston and Richardson (2000) describe the strong reaction to these losses and a backlash against air bags, despite their benefits. The unintended consequences of air bags have led to technology developments and changes to standards and regulations. Between 1997 and 2000, NHTSA developed a number of interim solutions designed to reduce the risks of air bags, including on-off switches and deployment with less force (Ho, 2006). Simultaneously, safer air bags, called advanced air bags, were developed that deploy with a force tailored to the occupant by taking into account the seat position, belt usage, occupant weight, and other factors. In 2000, NHTSA mandated that the introduction of these advanced air bags begin in 2003 and that, by 2006, every new passenger vehicle would include these safety measures (NHTSA, 2000).
And unfortunately the US took the stance that airbag design should take into account that a seat belt will not be worn. US airbags explode with much more force and cause many more injuries than European ones.
Seatbelts reduced the death toll dramatically compared with no seatbelts. Airbags and seatbelts together reduce the death toll dramatically compared with just seatbelts.
In most of the world it's considered suicidal not to wear a seatbelt while in a moving vehicle.
An improvement is an improvement. A flaw of seatbelts is that some people still die when they wear them. That's not a valid argument to not wear seatbelts.
And I actually know a guy who slept on the wheel, feel sideways into the passenger's seat, then crashed into a tree. The steering wheel crushed the driver's seat where his chest had been. He would presumably die if he wore the seatbelt.
Of course, both seatbelts and airbags save many more lives than they take.
Seatbelts saved a bunch of lives by preventing occupants from getting flung out the car, so I’d imagine that being in the car is safer.
Current road death trends in the US indicate that people inside cars are dying less, but people outside of them are dying more, notably cyclists and pedestrians.
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