Miata Mailing List: September 1998, Message #107

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> From: Sonja62786@aol.com
> To: briang@adnc.com; miata@realbig.com
> Subject: Re: Buying a used miata, with apologies for reviving this
topic(LMC)
> Date: Tuesday, September 01, 1998 3:25 PM


Opps, sorry.  The "used miata" e-mail I sent to the miata mailing list was
supposed to go to the local San Diego Miata Club mailing list where a
thread on which year to buy used is currently running.  I did not intent to
revive any thread on the miata.net mailing list.

Brian Goodwin
Goodwin Racing Supply


> 
> In a message dated 98-09-01 17:38:08 EDT, briang@adnc.com writes:
> 
> << Without starting a debate on whether the 1.8 or 1.6 cars are better
from a
>  performance view I will add that one might want to consider 1.8 miatas
>  which are 1994 and up from a safety standpoint.  Only the 94 and up
miatas
>  have side impact protection and double airbags.
>   >>
> 
> Safety standpoint = Dual airbags?? 
> 
> hmmm..... well..... oh..... Actually for *real safety* get a '99 and be
sure
> to follow the pertinent instructions that come with the car and *always*
put
> the little ones in the back seat. :o)
> 
> On the serious side, check out the following article from Autoweek,
August 6,
> 1996
> 
> *****************************************
> 
> Are airbags a cure we can live without?
> by Matt Delorenzo 
> 
> Airbags have been called many things by many people--from ticking time 
> bombs to friendly marshmallows--but I've never heard them called a 
> vaccine.
> 
> In an attempt to rewrite history, Joan Claybrook is characterizing these 
> devices as a vaccine to explain why airbag deployments kill or maim 
> children.
> 
> Claybrook was the NHTSA administrator in the 1970s who mandated airbags. 
> USA Today, with an assist from our Washington correspondent Jayne 
> O'Donnell, recently published a report on the rise of fatalities 
> directly attributable to airbags. Unrestrained and out-of-position 
> passengers, usually--but not always--children, have been severely 
> injured or killed by bags which reach triple-digit speeds when they 
> open.
> 
> In the USA Today piece Claybrook characterizes the airbag as "a 
> technological vaccine. Every vaccine harms children. Everyone knows 
> there are adverse reactions. I know several children who are completely 
> disabled mentally and partly physically from vaccines. There's a risk."
> 
> If General Motors had applied that logic to the side-saddle tank design 
> on pickups--the slightly greater risk of mounting the tanks outside the 
> frame-rails balanced against the increased vehicle range during a period 
> of uncertain gas supplies--it would have had holy hell to pay. It seems 
> car companies can't use economic cost/benefit ratios if safety is 
> involved, but it's okay for safety advocates to sacrifice children for 
> the higher good of protecting people from their own stupidity.
> 
> What really rankles me is the foxhole conversion of Claybrook and 
> like-minded "safety" advocates to the notion that airbags are 
> supplemental restraints and therefore everyone needs to be buckled up.
> 
> "Whether riding in cars with or without airbags, children are safest in 
> the back seat, properly restrained," Claybrook writes in "Opposing 
> View," in USA Today, July 9.
> 
> If children, let alone adults. were properly restrained, there would be 
> no need for airbags, period. But Claybrook and her cohorts characterized 
> airbags as friendly marshmallows in order to sell the devices as the 
> primary means of satisfying Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208, 
> which required automatic crash protection. Drivers and passengers were 
> relieved of their personal responsibility to use seatbelts by a 
> government requirement that cars be equipped with passive restraints. 
> These included airbags, automatic belts, and even so-called friendly 
> interiors, padded to allow unrestrained passengers to bounce around as 
> long as they weren't injured. 
> 
> But advocates wanted airbags all along. They burnished this myth of the 
> airbag as a friendly marshmallow with slow motion pictures of soft 
> billowy clouds coming out of steering wheels to protect crash dummies. 
> In real time, an airbag deployment is a violent event. It wouldn't have 
> been convenient to sell the benefits of airbags if the public knew how 
> they really worked.
> 
> If people believe that they are safe, how many don't wear seatbelts 
> under the mistaken impression that they're protected? If airbags are 
> supplemental restraints, why is no one questioning the need for them if 
> the priority is to get everyone to buckle up? How many millions spent on 
> airbags could have gone to that effort?
> 
> If airbags are a vaccine. when will Claybrook and others realize that 
> the cure for those they were hoping to protect, the unbelted, can be 
> worse than the disease? 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> AutoWeek August 5, 1996. Copyright 1996 by Crain Communications Inc. 
> Reprinted with permission from AutoWeek, 1996. 
> 
> *********************************************
> 
> Sonja and Old Blue
> 
> "It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly
not
> desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."  - Woody Allen