strad, my point (which I poorly made in the first post) was that airbags first installed in the early 70's were being explored as a non-intrusive safety system mainly because there was no law to wear seat belts in the US. Sure, even in the video I provide they say wear a lap belt, but they don’t say it’s a must and they specifically say you don’t need a shoulder belt.
Yes, I concede that there could have been cases of death by airbag, but where's the actual data? Are the majority of the deaths in the US, where high power airbags are installed because seat belt use is not compulsory? Are the majority of deaths children, before there was proper education about sitting in the front seat? Are we just going to throw anecdotal evidence at each other and see what sticks?
Here’s an update on my first post for your reading pleasure. I finally found the article.
While I wrongly stated that neither were wearing a seatbelt, one person in-fact was. The best bit though (something that I had forgotten), they were both driving the exact same car! Note the quote from ‘Woody’ at the end. This was the general thinking at the time when airbags were finally re-introduced.
...Ronnie Woody headed west on Route 640 in his brand-new Chrysler LeBaron. Coming in the opposite direction on the two-lane road was Priscilla Van Steelant, also driving a Chrysler LeBaron. According to the police report, Van Steelant, 39, strayed over the unmarked center of the road and smashed into Woody head-on, the two cars colliding at an estimated combined speed of 70 mph. “I saw a car coming down the wrong side of the road,” says Woody, 22, a construction worker. “I thought, ‘Surely she’s going to get out of the way.’ The next thing I remember is some guy asking me if I was all right.”
Amazingly, he was, as was Van Steelant. Woody escaped with a cut on his elbow and a bruised knee, while Van Steelant had a bloody nose and various minor bruises. Paramedics who arrived expecting a difficult rescue found it hard to believe that both drivers had walked away from a potentially fatal crash. “They said to me, ‘Where’s the driver?’ ” reports Van Steelant. “I said, ‘I am the driver.’ I had to argue with them, to convince them I was the driver.”
Woody and Van Steelant owe their miraculous escape to air bags that inflated in½5th of a second. This was the first head-on crash in which both cars were equipped with the air bags. Consumer groups have long pressured automakers to install air bags in all cars. Chrysler has been a leader, equipping all their domestically produced cars with driver-side air bags. Both Woody, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and Van Steelant, who had buckled up, are living proof of air bags’ effectiveness. “You can’t make everybody wear a seat belt, but you can put an air bag in every car,” says Woody.
https://people.com/archive/dueling-air- ... -33-no-16/
