Miata Mailing List: September 1998, Message #134

sponsored by

At 06:26 PM 9/1/98 +0000, Sonja62786@aol.com wrote:
>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?? 
>

Sonja, the airbags can be easily removed.  But I like your post.  

/^\dans



>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
>
>
>