Make Air Bags Optional

Air Bags

The following column is an important contribution to the air bag questions that are now facing NHTSA, Congress and the American people. The column appeared in the Washington Times and in the Detroit Free Press.

It is strong testimony to the safety problems that have been created by the air bag mandate. The writer, Dr. Leonard Evans, has a 4-foot-11-inch wife, and a daughter of the same size. He does not want them maimed or killed by a mandated air bag, and both ladies are in the very high risk group for air bag injuries or fatalities. He wants the air bag mandate repealed, and for the purchase and use of air bags to be completely optional.

This does not make his position extraordinary. There are millions of people in America today who also urgently want air bags to be totally optional, for both purchase and usage.

What makes Dr. Evans' letter so extraordinary is his background. He is the internationally known author of the classic book on driving safety, Traffic Safety and the Driver. He was invited to speak at air bag hearings in front of the National Transportation Safety Board, and gave testimony similar to the opinions you see here. He is one of the principal safety research scientists at General Motors. He holds Fellow status in the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. In 1991, he received NHTSA's Special Award of Appreciation for Outstanding Leadership and Extraordinary Contributions in the Field of Motor Vehicle Safety. In short, he is an internationally recognized traffic safety research expert.

He personally opposes the mandate for air bags, and carefully documents why many of the claims for air bag benefits are based on faulty research and faulty assumptions. He further believes it is wrong to endanger or kill people in one group in order to save people in another group.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE ARE HIS PERSONAL VIEWS and do NOT represent the views of his employer (General Motors), any other company, or any of the associations to which he belongs.

If you agree that air bags should be optional equipment, and not mandated, please contact your legislators and ask that they actively work to make air bags optional equipment, for both purchases on new vehicles and usage on existing ones.

The column by Dr. Leonard Evans is included below.

Offering Motorists The Air Bag Option
By Dr. Leonard Evans

Government air bag policy looks more and more like the emperor with no clothes. Increasingly bizarre pronouncements are offered to conceal its nakedness, including: Don't place infants in front seats. Don't allow children under twelve to sit in front seats. If you are short, move your seat back and add blocks to the pedals so you can still reach them. Such actions are not merely inconvenient, they can reduce safety. Infants and children in rear seats divert driver attention from the road ahead. By moving seats back, short drivers reduce their already compromised forward view, and make braking more difficult.

The mandate requiring air bags was supported by government claims, documented in the 1977 Federal Register, that they would save over 90,000 lives per decade - an absurd claim relative to technical data then available. The current (far too optimistic) claim is that they have saved 1,700 lives from 1986 to 1996, less than 2% of the original claim, and an even smaller percent of the more than 400,000 traffic deaths that occurred in this period.

The three best technical studies consistently find that airbags reduce the risk of death in a crash by 9 percent for belted drivers. To interpret a 9 percent effectiveness, think of 100 belted drivers killed in cars without air bags. If the cars had air bags (everything else being equal), then 91 would still die and 9 would survive, usually with severe injuries. I am unaware of any intervention approved by the FDA with an effectiveness as low as 9 percent. Even for those driving without safety belts, which is illegal in all states except New Hampshire, air bags reduce fatality risk by only 13 percent.

The claim that air bags have saved 1,700 lives is an inference calculated from estimated effectiveness - the technical community cannot identify even one individual whose life was saved by an airbag. In stark contrast, there are already 62 known individuals who were killed by air bags in crashes that, without the airbag, were unlikely to injure. The vast majority of the claimed reduction of 1,700 fatalities were unbelted males, nearly half of them drunk. The government has chosen to not publish any estimate of the reduction (or is it an increase?) in the number of fatalities to sober belted women.

The claim that airbag policy has saved lives is based on a fundamental assumption that is false: namely, that the policy has zero influence on driver behavior. A number of short ladies have informed me that they began to drive more cautiously when they realized air bags could kill them. The opposite effect also occurs - the belief that we cannot get hurt produces less cautious driving. If the misconception that air bags substantially reduce risk led to even a 2 mph increase in average travel speed, this would more than cancel the modest benefit of the airbag, thereby increasing national traffic fatalities.

Since 1980, traffic fatalities in Britain and Canada, countries where safety policy has focused on important items like drunk driving and belt wearing, rather than on air bags, traffic fatalities declined by 39 percent and 40 percent, respectively. If fatalities in the United States had declined by 39 percent since 1980, we would now be experiencing more than 10,000 fewer deaths per year. Instead we are congratulating ourselves on saving 1,700 lives in a decade, a claim that isn't even true.

The most crucial problem with the air bag is the fundamental ethical issue of killing people in some categories in order to save people in others. There is now clear evidence that air bag effectiveness is lower than average for many large sectors of the population - females, short people, old people, and occupants of smaller cars. Given that the effectiveness is 9 percent for the entire population, it cannot decline much before becoming negative. It is therefore possible, and indeed likely, that the airbag increases the average risk of death in a crash for persons in broad categories containing millions of Americans.

While depowering can decrease the number of people killed by air bags, it will decrease even more the number saved, thus reducing the 9 percent effectiveness still further.

The problems with air bags are intrinsic - deploying an occupant protection device after the crash has already occurred is simply too late. The problems cannot be solved by so-called smart air bags. Improvements as large as 10 percent rarely occur in mature technologies; air bags have been around for over three decades. Even if a somewhat implausible improvement in performance as large as 10 percent could be achieved, this would raise the present 9 percent effectiveness only to 9.9 percent. Injecting a new generation of untested air bags under current regulations is tantamount to again compelling the American public to be involuntary guinea pigs in an experiment in which we already know millions will be placed at increased risk of being killed. It is simply unacceptable to turn the old rule of the sea on its head, and make it "women and children first" to be sacrificed in order to protect large unbelted men.

Air bags were mandated because they were supposed to be passive devices requiring no user actions. In fact they are far less passive than manual safety belts, which require users to learn only one simple rule - fasten your belt. Doing so reduces driver fatality risk by 42 percent without negative side effects. Given the danger, inconvenience, cost, burdensome instructions, and low effectiveness of air bags, their mandatory installation would never have been considered if the airbag were merely a technical device. It has, however, acquired the status of a religious icon to the anti-technical believers who inflicted the mandate on the nation in the first place, and whose beliefs are too strong for them to admit that they were wrong.

The only reasonable approach is for the Government to neither prohibit nor mandate air bags or airbag on-off switches for the new or after-market. If consumers are allowed to choose, some will make bad choices. This is still far preferable to the present situation in which the government compels bad choices on millions of us.

Make Air Bags Optional

Search Air Bags

Information

Sponsored Links