Car Airbags

[NecCat]

I just got a (relatively) new car, and did what I've done for my last few newly purchased cars. I took it to a garage and asked them to disable the airbag. They won't. I've called around, I can't find anyone who will. It used to not be a problem, but since I bought my last car it seems some mechanics have been charged when people were injured in car accidents where the airbag was disabled. So now I have to have an airbag, whether it will most likely kill me (it will) or not.

I'm 5'2". I cannot physically sit far enough from the steering wheel to have the necessary margin of safety in case the airbag goes off. But because large people weren't being fully protected by seatbelts they had to invent this mechanism that WILL seriously injure or kill me if it goes off, and it has become mandatory for everyone. Thanks to the government for keeping other people safe at my expense - my tax dollars at work!

[protege]

Uh, I assume you've never had your face bounced off the steering wheel? I got rear-ended, with enough force to do just that. It hurt like a bitch, and left me with my jaw being messed up.

My dad is also alive because of the airbags in his car. A couple of years ago, some asshole ran a stop sign, and pulled out in front of him. He hit my dad's little Hyundai head-on Car was totaled, dad came away with only cuts and bruises. Had those airbags not been in his car, he would have been seriously injured or killed.

[NecCat]

No, but I've been in the passenger seat during an extremely serious accident and the air bag saved me from additional injury. I was sitting with my chest a good two feet from the dash, so it's not really the same thing.

In my car, where my chest is about 5" from the steering wheel when I can reach the bottom of the clutch, if I get in an accident the air bag is far more than likely to cause me serious, life threatening or fatal injury. It is now against the law for a licensed mechanic to assist me in protecting myself from this danger - or at least the mechanics all said they could be charged.

It doesn't really matter, I think I'm going to wait to the weekend then take a hammer to it and hope I don't break my arm. I still hate that something that could kill me is required equipment because it could prevent injury in others. When something could cause more or less injury depending on the person using it, it shouldn't be mandatory for all.

[gremcint]

To be fair to the law you could resell the car and not tell the next person about the airbag issue.

[HYHYBT]

Some cars have adjustable pedals; would it help to choose a different car in which you could sit in a safe position rather than objecting to a system people would find excuses not to buy (and manufacturers, excuses not to supply) if they weren't mandatory? Along similar lines, there exist pedal extenders and even hand controls. And if you're so close the airbag itself would kill you, you're probably dead in any accident where you'd need it anyway.

[wolfie]

A car with airbags is not necessarily safer than a car without them. According to the '93 issue of the Lemon-Aid New Car Guide (bought when researching my first car), the Hyundai Excel (what I wound up buying) didn't offer airbags, but had a better front-impact rating than the Honda Civic (where they were standard).

I'm going to be putting a few times the book value into fixing up my current vehicle (a '96 - don't know how this one slipped through without airbags) BECAUSE it doesn't have them. I don't subscribe to the theory that bombs in the passenger compartment, rigged to detonate in the event of a collision, are a safety feature.

Explosives, by their nature, are unstable - some become less sensitive with age, while others become more sensitive. One (third-hand) source said that to be sure of having them work properly, airbags need to be replaced with new (NOT "new-old-stock", which would have experienced the same aging as the originals) ones periodically (estimates ranging from 5-10 years). Is an automaker going to produce new airbags for a car that's a couple "generations" out of date? Nope.

The main effect of airbags (besides protecting people who refuse to wear seat belts, and maiming people who have the misfortune to be short) is to increase the chance of a car being "totalled". If a car is more than a few years old, the cost of replacing the airbags is going to run higher than the threshold for a write-off. It's in the automakers' interest to put in as many bags as possible, so that it will be more expensive to repair a damaged car, and therefore be more likely to result in a write-off.

Have you considered going to a custom accessories shop, finding a steering wheel that you prefer to the stock one (not hard, since aftermarket wheels generally don't contain class 1 hazardous material), and having them install it? Either that, or find someone who's "good with tools" but not a licensed mechanic, paying cash (i.e. the modifications are not traceable to them) to get the airbag disabled?

[TheHuckster]

A car with airbags is not necessarily safer than a car without them. According to the '93 issue of the Lemon-Aid New Car Guide (bought when researching my first car), the Hyundai Excel (what I wound up buying) didn't offer airbags, but had a better front-impact rating than the Honda Civic (where they were standard).

An article over 20 years old has little relevance today, after a couple decades of improvements to all kinds of vehicle safety measures. You might as well point to a Boeing 707's safety record to determine how safe a 787 is.

I don't subscribe to the theory that bombs in the passenger compartment, rigged to detonate in the event of a collision, are a safety feature.

That's a... rather special way to word it. Did you know in the engine in your car there are a few hundred explosions occurring every few seconds? Egads, when you put it that way, it sounds terrible, doesn't it?!

The main effect of airbags (besides protecting people who refuse to wear seat belts, and maiming people who have the misfortune to be short) is to increase the chance of a car being "totalled". If a car is more than a few years old, the cost of replacing the airbags is going to run higher than the threshold for a write-off. It's in the automakers' interest to put in as many bags as possible, so that it will be more expensive to repair a damaged car, and therefore be more likely to result in a write-off.

Do you have a credible source for this statement? In the mid-twentieth century, cars were unbelievably sturdy and upon impact, they crumpled much differently than they do today. The whole purpose of a car crumpling upon impact is to sacrifice its components in order to save a life. All those slow-motion crash safety tests demonstrate this tremendously. Just because, as a side-effect, the car is in far worse shape than the passengers doesn't mean there's some conspiracy from the automakers that they're specifically doing it to make more money. Same goes for airbags.

Airbags have historically had a bad rep, and they were certainly more dangerous 15 years ago than today. If you look at this report, airbag-related fatalities have been reduced from 48 in 1998 to just 7 in 2007.

[protege]

The whole purpose of a car crumpling upon impact is to sacrifice its components in order to save a life. All those slow-motion crash safety tests demonstrate this tremendously. Just because, as a side-effect, the car is in far worse shape than the passengers doesn't mean there's some conspiracy from the automakers that they're specifically doing it to make more money. Same goes for airbags.

Cars are designed to crumple up in an accident. Many new cars have "fold lines" inside their hoods, so the panels will crease in an accident. The idea being, to absorb most of the force of the collision, and prevent it being passed onto the occupants. For example, the photo I attached, is the remains of my dad's Hyundai. The car looks pretty bad, but he walked away from the wreck. With some assistance from firemen when the door latch jammed. Sure, the car looks (and was) destroyed. But, the front end crumpled up exactly like it was supposed to. Passenger compartment was a mess (his coffee mug and school papers went flying), but intact.

Automotive technology has come a long way in 20 or 30 years. First car I had, was an '87 Tempo. That was one of the first cars to come with an airbag. Only on the driver's side. It wasn't until later that automakers started putting them on both sides, and eventually all the way around. My mom's 2013 Toyota Rav4 has multiple airbags--in front of driver and passenger, curtain ones in the roof, and ones in the doors too.

[HYHYBT]

This reminds me of my 89 Oldsmobile. It didn't have airbags; they somehow managed to count mounting the seatbelts on the door as passive restraint, since technically it was possible to leave them buckled while getting in and out. But Pop bought it new at the same time a friend of the family got one just like it. She had a wreck, I think involving being squeezed between trailer trucks, though at this point the details are hazy. Her car was crushed... except for the passenger compartment. Her only injury was a bruise from the shoulder belt. To me, that suggests it's a safe car; Dad took it to mean the car was UNsafe, and when I eventually wound up with Pop's, he worried about how supposedly dangerous it was the whole time I had it.

[Greenday]

I don't subscribe to the theory that bombs in the passenger compartment, rigged to detonate in the event of a collision, are a safety feature.

Explosives, by their nature, are unstable - some become less sensitive with age, while others become more sensitive. One (third-hand) source said that to be sure of having them work properly, airbags need to be replaced with new (NOT "new-old-stock", which would have experienced the same aging as the originals) ones periodically (estimates ranging from 5-10 years). Is an automaker going to produce new airbags for a car that's a couple "generations" out of date? Nope.

Sorry, explosives? Detonations? Do airbags work differently from what I understand? Do they pack TNT in your car or something?

Not all explosives are unstable. I'm not sure where you are getting your information, but that's factually wrong.

So as life-saving technology gets better, we should replace them? I'm not sure what's wrong with this.

Edit: Looked it up since I honestly had no idea how they worked. It technically falls under the definition of a chemical explosion. It's a rapid chemical reaction which builds up pressure quickly. The current chemical used doesn't explode until 300C (a.k.a. too hot to be randomly set off). It looks like they are moving away from it though.

With the quantities used, I don't see any reason to fear it.

[TheHuckster]

Cars are designed to crumple up in an accident. Many new cars have "fold lines" inside their hoods, so the panels will crease in an accident. The idea being, to absorb most of the force of the collision, and prevent it being passed onto the occupants. For example, the photo I attached, is the remains of my dad's Hyundai. The car looks pretty bad, but he walked away from the wreck. With some assistance from firemen when the door latch jammed. Sure, the car looks (and was) destroyed. But, the front end crumpled up exactly like it was supposed to. Passenger compartment was a mess (his coffee mug and school papers went flying), but intact.

Automotive technology has come a long way in 20 or 30 years. First car I had, was an '87 Tempo. That was one of the first cars to come with an airbag. Only on the driver's side. It wasn't until later that automakers started putting them on both sides, and eventually all the way around. My mom's 2013 Toyota Rav4 has multiple airbags--in front of driver and passenger, curtain ones in the roof, and ones in the doors too.

I'm not sure if you read my post wrong or you were simply adding to it, but you basically repeated the point I was making.

[NecCat]

And if you're so close the airbag itself would kill you, you're probably dead in any accident where you'd need it anyway.

My airbag would have gone off in the accident that my last car was in. It was totalled, neither driver side door would open at all, 3 windows broke including the windshield, the axle was bent, one tire popped. I was parked, with the car turned off, when someone hit me. I walked out of it without so much as a scratch or a bruise. Had I not had the airbag of that car disabled when I bought it 6 or 7 years ago, I would still be in hospital now, if I had survived the airbag going off at all. Having an airbag set off is not much of an indication of how much damage the driver would suffer - more on how much the car suffered.

Airbags have historically had a bad rep, and they were certainly more dangerous 15 years ago than today. If you look at this report, airbag-related fatalities have been reduced from 48 in 1998 to just 7 in 2007.

The link you provided more or less proves my point. 5% or less of white females (I couldn't get the numbers for all races off my quick google search) are 62" or shorter, so approximately 2.5% of white adults would be. According to the first chart you link more than one third of adults who die as a result of airbags are females 62" high or less, and that number hasn't really changed as airbags were made safer. Considering what percentage of total drivers would fall into that category, that number is seriously skewed. Females 62" or less tall is actually the only category that is subdivided. Obviously the NHTSA knows the risk posed by airbags to me, and everyone like me.

Still no one can disable this device, which is a known danger to me, in my own car.

To be fair to the law you could resell the car and not tell the next person about the airbag issue.

So instead of not allowing mechanics to disable the airbag, require them to report the disabled airbag to the MTO or equivalent, the record stays with the car ownership. Problem solved. They already require that information about some damages that are considered permanent so that people are aware of what they are buying.

[TheHuckster]

The link you provided more or less proves my point. 5% or less of white females (I couldn't get the numbers for all races off my quick google search) are 62" or shorter, so approximately 2.5% of white adults would be. According to the first chart you link more than one third of adults who die as a result of airbags are females 62" high or less, and that number hasn't really changed as airbags were made safer. Considering what percentage of total drivers would fall into that category, that number is seriously skewed. Females 62" or less tall is actually the only category that is subdivided. Obviously the NHTSA knows the risk posed by airbags to me, and everyone like me.

If you read the report more closely, you will see that the vast majority of the vehicles involved in these serious accidents are older than 2000 models. Newer cars have far safer airbags than in prior decades. You are trying to claim that you know for sure you'd be dead if an airbag deployed, yet according to the charts, out of the thousands of vehicle accidents that have occurred between 2000 and 2007, only 7 people at your height or smaller were killed by an airbag, and each of them were from older vehicles.

[protege]

I'm not sure if you read my post wrong or you were simply adding to it, but you basically repeated the point I was making.

Nope, I read it right. I just added one of my own experiences

[HYHYBT]

What about the possibility of altering other aspects of the car, such as pedal pisition, to allow you to sit in a safer position rather than disabling the airbag?