I thought air bags saved lives ?

[Nevada Ed]

Well it finally happened.............

News this morning said that a teenaged girl was killed by her air bag.

Things are going to get ugly !!

 

[jlrhiner]

Was it a Takata airbag?

 

[unobrownsfan]

It may be time for Takata's CEO Shigehisa Takada to bone up on the ancient samurai ritual of seppuku.

 

[Qball]

Not surprising, they pack a hefty punch.

 

[Gamecock]

Automotive airbags are a hoax. A very expensive hoax.

The idea arose in the 70s for a passive restraint system, cos people wouldn't use their seat belts. By mid-80s, they finally realized that airbags wasn't going to work - single impact and no side protection. Without seatbelts, people could slide under the bag.

Didn't matter there was no efficacy. Government mandated them.

They have always been especially dangerous for small people/children. As Lee Iacocca said in 1984, the airbag solution is worse than the problem.

The airbag offers no advantage over the shoulder belt, which people are required to wear, anyway.

 

[Tom S.]

A lot of people die in car accidents not from being crushed or impaled, but from internal injuries caused by the sudden stop, whether it be from a steering wheel or a locked seat belt. The purpose of the front air bag system is to slow down this process, even though it's over the course of milliseconds. Declines in traffic deaths over the decades that seat belts, airbags and crumple zones have been put into place prove beyond the shadow of a doubt they work. Despite the number of cars we have on the roads being far more than what there were in the 60's, traffic fatalities are far less, not on a prorated basis, but actual numbers.

Unfortunately, the reverse can also be true of an airbag. If it deploys accidentally when there is no forward motion to decrease, it can have the reverse effect of throwing the body back into the fairly rigid seat. Above that, it could also obviously cause a person to lose control and crash, now without the protection the air bag was supposed to be providing.

In any event, my prayers go out to her family. What a tragedy.

 

[Arik]

Automotive airbags are a hoax. A very expensive hoax.

The idea arose in the 70s for a passive restraint system, cos people wouldn't use their seat belts. By mid-80s, they finally realized that airbags wasn't going to work - single impact and no side protection. Without seatbelts, people could slide under the bag.

Didn't matter there was no efficacy. Government mandated them.

They have always been especially dangerous for small people/children. As Lee Iacocca said in 1984, the airbag solution is worse than the problem.

The airbag offers no advantage over the shoulder belt, which people are required to wear, anyway.

There is no way to prove or disprove it. Can't tell if someone would have died or lived with or without the airbag.

And seat belts can kill too. Guess it's another hoax.

I have a friend who considers child vaccines a hoax. He uses some obscure 1700th century German records to disprove it

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

[RSanch111]

I've investigated thousands of crashes and hundreds of criticals and fatals. Airbags save lives. I've seen plenty of side-impact crashes where there's no doubt the side curtain airbag prevented a fatality or lessened the degree if injury that most likely would have been sustained otherwise. Yeah, I'm not an MD but some things are obvious from looking at the damage and injuries on-scene. You don't have to be a physicist to known something about the basics of momentum and how to read a crash scene.

And what would you expect Lee Iacocca to say when mandated by the government to either raise prices or reduce profits or both? He also told us the K-Car was a great car.

PS. if you're going to work on the steering wheel or column of your car, make sure you disconnect the battery before you mess with the airbag!

 

[rwsmith]

One thing you don't hear about any more......

You don't hear about people left impaled on the steering columns but I guess the collapsible steering wheel helped with that too.

First generation air bags were ROUGH on occupants. I guy got in a wreck and the only reason he had to go to the hospital was that the airbag abraded a lot of skin off his face, BAD.

 

[RSanch111]

Pretty amazing how much more sophisticated they are now.... We can often tell who was sitting in which seat often by the way the event data recorders show the airbag deployment. "I wasn't driving, the dead chick was!" Car seats now have sensors that sense the weight of the driver in order to know how much power to give the airbag. Same goes for the airbag sensors in the front of the car.

And the seatbelt pretensioners have "explosive" charges in them to take the slack out of the seatbelts before you hit the steering wheel after impact. Engineers have saved LOTS of lives.

 

[Leatherman-Cowboy]

Air bags saves a countless amount of would be dead people, and also has reduced the number of serious injuries. IF any was to take the time and research how the new air bags are made-deploy-function in concert with all the other safety features in vehicles, then it's clear that they work. Many of us will never KNOW if they work, unless we are in a head-on or T-bone crash.
I work in the Auto industry, and have 16 years of experience in the field.

Try this out----have a pillow fight or a close encounter with a wall/car bumper etc-----the chances are way better the pillow---even if filled with down, will be the best choice.

Read-research, then make a statement. Yes?

Thank you,

 

[LVSteve]

The Takata airbag issue is that when they go off they can produce sharp shards of metal due to corrosion of the gas generator. This is confirmed for about a dozen cases, but you have to figure there are others that have not been diagnosed.

 

[Chuck24]

Seat belts save lives, airbags save your face.

 

[Fishinfool]

Automotive airbags are a hoax. A very expensive hoax.

The idea arose in the 70s for a passive restraint system, cos people wouldn't use their seat belts. By mid-80s, they finally realized that airbags wasn't going to work - single impact and no side protection. Without seatbelts, people could slide under the bag.

Didn't matter there was no efficacy. Government mandated them.

They have always been especially dangerous for small people/children. As Lee Iacocca said in 1984, the airbag solution is worse than the problem.

The airbag offers no advantage over the shoulder belt, which people are required to wear, anyway.

Have to respectfully disagree with most of your premise that seat / shoulder belts are just as good as air bags. Having been a trooper in the 1980's, when air bags didn't exist, I have seen the injuries people suffered with just belts. It often was not pretty. Head injuries, flail chest, and crushed knees were common, and even slow speed side impacts were often deadly.

Now, other modern design features such as crush spaces, collapsible steering wheels, and cage construction has gone a long way towards reducing injuries, but airbags have been a major player. People walk away from accidents today that would have been about guaranteed fatal a generation ago, and statistics back it up. Side impact bags have proven another positive step.

That said, nothing is guaranteed, and there have been bag malfunctions, but I believe the positives far outway the over all negatives.

Larry

 

[Gamecock]

I've investigated thousands of crashes and hundreds of criticals and fatals. Airbags save lives. I've seen plenty of side-impact crashes where there's no doubt the side curtain airbag prevented a fatality or lessened the degree if injury that most likely would have been sustained otherwise. Yeah, I'm not an MD but some things are obvious from looking at the damage and injuries on-scene. You don't have to be a physicist to known something about the basics of momentum and how to read a crash scene.

Good point. Side protection is minimal with seat belt/shoulder harness.

 

[Marine Corps Air]

This was a Takata manufactured air bag. It was also on the Honda recall list, but for whatever reasons or circumstances, the repairs were never made. It was a senseless loss of this young woman's life!

"Everybody should have walked away from this," Beckwith said in an interview. He said shrapnel punctured the air bag and sliced the young woman's neck and carotid artery. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Honda says new Takata air bag death reported in Texas | Reuters

This is the NHTSA website that should permit you to determine if the airbags in your car, or someone that you care about, should be replaced immediately -

NHTSA | Recalls Spotlight: Takata Air Bags Recalls

 

[rwsmith]

THAT'S.....

"Everybody should have walked away from this," Beckwith said in an interview. He said shrapnel punctured the air bag and sliced the young woman's neck and carotid artery. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

OMG THAT'S what happened! How horrible.

 

[BC38]

I thought airbags saved lives....

They do in 99.99% of the cases. But nothing made by human beings is perfect. The original design had a flaw, and there was a recall issued to correct it. Somebody failed to have the recall work done. Very unfortunate, but it doesn't in any way negate the thousands of lives saved by airbags.

 

[finesse_r]

Pretty soon cars will be so safe no one will be able to drive one. you just sit in it and recall what it was like to actually drive a moving vehicle.

 

[finesse_r]

They do in 99.99% of the cases. But nothing made by human beings is perfect. The original design had a flaw, and there was a recall issued to correct it. Somebody failed to have the recall work done. Very unfortunate, but it doesn't in any way negate the thousands of lives saved by airbags.

Nothing involving car accidents is even remotely close to 99.99 percent effective. LOL There is no telling what a low impact collision would do to a pregnant woman who would be perfectly safe without the air bag. As this case indicates air bags pack quite a punch no matter how bad the causative collision is.

I doubt any of us know how effective most air bags are (they are not all alike and they are not all in the same position relative to the human to be protected and all humans are not alike). I suspect they do a little more good than harm, at an enormous expense.

Please don't pipe in with, "well if they save one life they are worth it". LOL

My pet peeve is motor cycle helmets that can cause accidents. True they offer some protection to the head, but if you are in a serious collision with a truck or car you are not going to walk away from it helmet or no helmet. Whereas the restricted vision and more so the restricted hearing while wearing a helmet can cause the accident to begin with.

If you ride a motor cycle the best safety equipment is your sensory input and your judgment, so you can avoid accidents.

So safety regulations are not always that safe for everyone, which is why they should be optional not mandatory. Make them mandatory to be on the vehicle if you like, but optional as to wearing the safety gear or not.

We all have a God given right to be dumb if we want to and it is no one's job to insure our safety against ourselves.