The Next Frontier in Auto Safety Is Side Collisions

Now that air bags are becoming a fixture in the automobile, the top priority for safety advocates is protecting drivers and passengers when cars get hit from the side.

The federal government is expected shortly to tell the auto industry to build cars so that people can survive side-impact collisions exceeding 30 miles per hour, the cause of one-fourth of auto crash deaths.

There appears to be little of the usual industry opposition to this latest safety initiative, befitting a receptive new climate for auto safety in both Detroit and Washington.

It is shown in the auto industry’s recent embrace, under regulatory pressure, of the air bag it fought for two decades, and in what safety advocates describe as a more aggressive National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under the Bush Administration.

But now the safety industry finds itself wrestling with another potential obstacle in the 1990s: renewed demands for better fuel economy.

The insurance industry, a prime advocate and beneficiary of the air bag and other safety measures, is mounting a campaign to publicize the safety threat of small cars--which happen to be the most fuel-efficient.

A report to be issued next week by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that the “down-sizing” of General Motors’ cars--done in the name of better fuel economy--has caused death rates to jump as much as 67% because the smaller cars are more dangerous than the ones they replaced.

“Safety has gotten short shrift in the debate on fuel economy,” says Chuck Hurley, a spokesman for the Insurance Institute.

The safety trade-off with small cars, a simple demonstration of the laws of physics, has been recognized all along. But the conflict has been underscored by recent events.

The cutoff of oil from Kuwait and Iraq has driven up gasoline prices and revived concerns about energy security, triggering fresh demands in Congress that cars be built to go much farther on a gallon of gas. One proposal calls for fleet averages of 40 miles per gallon by the year 2000, up from 27.5 m.p.g. today.

This fuel-economy uproar dovetails with the return of environmentalism, especially demands for cleaner air, because the volume of emissions from auto tailpipes is partly related to how much gasoline is being burned.

Thus even air bag manufacturers, whose driver-side systems weigh about 40 pounds, are under the gun to make their bags lighter. They plan to replace steel components with aluminum to reduce what amounts to the fuel-economy penalty for saving lives.

Not that the air bag industry is complaining. Led by Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp., and finally joined this week by the No. 1 auto maker, General Motors, the auto industry is projected to put air bags in 90% of the cars it builds in North America in 1996--versus about 31% today and a mere 6% last year.

TRW Inc., claiming one-third of the current $3.5-billion world market for air bag and seat belt systems, says the market will hit $8 billion by 1995. The company is building and expanding factories in Arizona and Tennessee to meet the demand and boost its share closer to half.

Even Japanese auto firms--long accused by auto safety advocates of dragging their feet on safety issues--are getting on the air bag bandwagon. Each Japanese auto maker offers bags on at least one model sold here now, and air bag industry sources say that by 1995 virtually all Japanese cars built in the United States will have air bags.

A trade publication says that Tokai Rika Co., a sister company of Toyota that supplies the company’s seat belts, is to start making air bag systems in Battle Creek, Mich., in 1994. And within Japan, the air bag market is projected to more than double to $1.4 billion by the mid-1990s, according to TRW.

The lifesaving, injury-reducing benefits of the air bag will grow as the inflatable gadgets spread from luxury cars--whose drivers aren’t noted for getting into crashes--to higher-volume, lower-priced, smaller models.

Indeed, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who helped launch the air bag battle in the 1960s, claims the air bag helps to diminish the safety gap between small and large cars.

“We’ve won, if you consider it a victory when it takes 20 years,” he said.

Robert Crandall, an auto and steel industry expert at the Brookings Institution, has studied safety, fuel economy and small cars. He believes the coming of age of the air bag pretty much completes the safety task for automobile manufacturers.

“My impression is that this is the big item, and that whatever’s left on the agenda is relatively minor. We’ve really gone a long way on the vehicle manufacturing side,” Crandall said.

But air bags work only in frontal collisions, or about half of all fatal crashes. So beyond drunk-driving crackdowns, tougher law enforcement and other measures aimed at drivers, the Insurance Institute lists the side-impact problem at the top of its list.

“Side-impact standards will be the big issue through the 1990s,” says Sherman E. Henson, manager of side-impact and safety planning at Ford Motor Co.

People are especially vulnerable to side collisions because there is virtually no “crush space” between them and the oncoming car.

The government and auto companies have been doing crash tests and other research into the problem. Most of the controversy so far is over the reliability and uniformity of the sophisticated dummies used in the crash tests to simulate human injuries, said Henson.

The traffic safety administration is expected later this year to set deadlines for auto companies to meet side-crash standards in which occupants of cars could escape serious injury in collisions at up to 33.5 m.p.h.

A TRW spokesman said the company is investigating ways to mount air bags in the sides of cars, but any such technology is years away. For now, auto firms plan to make the doors and side pillars thicker, use stronger steel and install lots of interior padding.

Henson said the structural changes won’t be noticeable, but the energy-absorbing padding probably will be, especially on small cars. The firms will thus be faced with shrinking the interior space or making the cars wider, he said.

While some existing big cars will probably meet any new standard, beefing up the smaller cars will add “a significant amount of weight,” he said. Ford hasn’t estimated the dollar cost or the fuel economy loss, but isn’t objecting in any case.

The traffic safety administration figures that the proposed side-impact standards, which also require that car doors not come open during a crash, would save up to 1,200 lives and 5,000 serious injuries annually within 10 years. Air bags are expected to save 9,000 lives a year.

“I think everybody agrees it’s a good idea to move in this area,” Henson said.