Miata Mailing List: September 1998, Message #93

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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

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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? 


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AutoWeek August 5, 1996. Copyright 1996 by Crain Communications Inc. 
Reprinted with permission from AutoWeek, 1996. 

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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