ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 14, 1996 TAG: 9611140012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN R. WHITE
THE AIR bag is much in the news lately - and much on everybody's mind. Suddenly, cruelly, we have been made aware that the same bag that saves lives and faces in auto collisions can kill children. Why, you may ask, weren't people informed of this before the event?
The short answer is that the federal rule makers don't think any further ahead than lunch, and the automakers didn't want to spoil yours by talking about the possibility of dead children. Field tests on bag deployment surely indicated that small people were at risk. As with a lot of federally mandated programs, there was a rush to achieve perceived benefit while discounting industry caveats as stalling tactics to save money. Corporations may not be big on altruism, but they're not always wrong when they urge caution in adopting new programs.
For example, the auto companies have always known of perils inherent in the passenger-side air bag and were reluctant to rush into them. Engineering a bag for a driver was relatively easy; you know where the driver is, and it's not likely to be a 4-year-old at the wheel. But one never can be certain exactly where the passenger is or how big the passenger is - and the passenger-side bag has to be bigger and cover more territory.
In the rush to mandate dual air bags, the feds never considered the child question - or if they did, they didn't share the problem with the public. Perhaps that would have delayed public acceptance of an air bag. Most parents would rather accept risk for themselves - do without an air bag - rather than put a child in peril.
Now what? You have dual air bags and a couple of kids. What do you do?
Change the lifestyle a bit. Put the small fry in back - and make certain they belt up. The best way to inspire a child to buckle up is to do it yourself; example works. Without a seat belt, you are at risk from the air bag because you won't be where you are supposed to be when the bag goes off. Infants and toddlers should be restrained in child safety seats. These seats are best used facing backward - now here's a real dilemma. An infant facing rearward up front is going to be at severe risk in a crash; the air bag becomes lethal. In the rear seat, how does one secure a child facing rearward?
Pickup trucks are still another story; standard pickups do not have rear seats, and pickups are getting air bags. So, do you forbid your children to ride in the family pickup? It would seem so. Ford is introducing trucks with cutoff switches for the passenger-side bag to offer parents a better choice. But the feds were looking askance at that. There's nothing that irritates a bureaucrat more than someone tampering with the red tape.
Short adults and those who tend to snug up real close to the steering wheel are also at risk. Driving with your chin over the steering wheel invites serious injury in a bag deployment. Learn to sit back from the wheel; you will achieve greater control of the car in the process.
The speed of bag deployment is another issue - it relates to how bad a crash for which you want to be prepared. High-speed crashes require very quick bag deployment to prevent death and injury. But at low speeds, fast-deploying bags can cause injury - your body has not yet arrived at the point of optimum contact. The slower speeds of deployment that protect well in slower-speed collisions get the bag in place too late in a high-speed collision but are less harmful in and of themselves. But an air bag is an explosive device, an inherently dangerous apparatus - it's just that crashes are a lot more dangerous.
It's seat belts that save lives for the most part; air bags most of the time prevent facial injury but frequently do spare passengers from serious head damage. Buckle up, relax and take precautions with your kids. Life is a balance of risks; on balance, we're safer with air bags in front of us, safety belts buckled around us.
John R. White writes about cars for the Boston Globe.
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Medium: 74 linesby CNB