Air Bag Stories Keep Popping Up : Safety: Now in wide use, the device seems to offer hope for fewer road fatalities. Some who survived crashes tell of incredibly narrow escapes.
It has been almost a year since Robert Rogers became one of those Americans who believe they owe their lives, or at least their limbs, to air bags.
On the morning of Jan. 19, 1990, Rogers, an appliance salesman from Babylon, N. Y., was driving his car when, he says, a van cut him off and he lost control. “I just cut the wheels a little bit to avoid hitting him,” Rogers, 30, said in an interview.
His car hit a foot-high curb and rolled over twice. He climbed out before it finally came to rest atop the median railing--on its left side.
That Rogers was able to climb out was, in itself, surprising. He had been traveling at about 60 m.p.h. and was not wearing a safety belt. Yet, he said, he walked away from the car, which was totaled, “without even feeling sore.”
Add Rogers’ experience to the ever-expanding book of “saved-by-the-air-bag” stories.
No one knows for sure how much human suffering and death airbags have prevented. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100 lives, perhaps 200, have been saved since the devices first became available as optional equipment. The 1990 model year was the first in which all new American passenger cars were required to have either air bags or automatic safety harnesses for both front-seat occupants.
About 4 million of the 193 million vehicles on the road today have at least a driver-side air bag. Brian O’Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, predicted that by the end of the 1996 model year all new cars will have both driver and passenger air bags.
About 45,000 people died in motoring accidents last year. The traffic safety agency predicted several years ago that 12,000 lives could be saved each year if all cars had two air bags.
Some road-safety advocates say the auto makers could move more quickly to equip cars and trucks with air bags. Clarence Ditlow, director of the private Center for Auto Safety, based in Washington, D.C., said he believes manufacturers could cut a year out of their schedules.
Jack Gillis, in “The Car Book” shopping guide, urges consumers to speed up the process by refusing to buy cars that don’t have air bags. “In our pockets and purses, we have the ability to change the practices of one of the nation’s most powerful industries,” he wrote.
Federal requirements for passive restraints were phased in beginning in 1987, after 15 years of acrimonious debate. The auto industry first opposed the law, then tried to slow the installation schedule, saying the bags would add too much to the price of a new car.
Auto makers who opt for air bags instead of automatic safety harnesses are required, by the 1994 model year, to install passenger-side air bags. They could comply with the law indefinitely by offering automatic belts, but few, if any, are expected to do so.
Gauging the life-saving value the air bag is difficult. It is impossible in many cases to say whether someone who survived would have died without it.
Chrysler Corp. estimates that about 8,000 of the 1.2 million cars it has equipped with air bags have been in crashes severe enough to deploy the devices. As to “whether somebody survived because of the bag? That’s really a judgment call in so many cases,” Chrysler spokesman Tom Jakobowski said.
The survivors may offer the most compelling testimony for air bags.
“We have seen cases where we don’t know how people survived even with an air bag, yet they are uninjured,” said Benjamin Parr, auto industry liaison for State Farm Mutual Insurance, which routinely investigates policyholders’ crashes involving air bag-equipped cars.
Perhaps the most widely publicized accident in which air bags are credited with saving lives occurred last March on a rural road near Culpepper, Va. Two 1989 Chrysler LeBarons collided head on at a combined speed of about 80 m.p.h., yet both drivers walked away with minor injuries.
The first collision of two air bag-equipped vehicles attracted considerable media attention, and Chrysler made use of the incident in advertisements.
Bill Langdon, a 39-year-old NYNEX manager from Riverdale, N.Y., said that he suffered only minor injuries when his air bag-equipped Acura Legend collided with a stolen vehicle in New York City last March. “He came right at me--not quite head on, but close to it,” Langdon said. Damage to Langdon’s car was put at $8,500.
Crash sensors cause the air bag to pop out, by nitrogen inflation, within a fraction of a second of impact. Afterward the bag quickly deflates. Most people cannot remember hearing the bag deploy, although it makes a sound similar to that of a firecracker exploding.
“It was there and then it wasn’t,” said Fred H. Campbell of Bridgeton, N. J., who who escaped injury in a five-car chain collision near Tampa, Fla., two years ago.
“You sit there and kind of stare at this collapsed thing. You say, ‘I’m looking at this bag and breathing, so I must be alive.’ ”
Safety experts say the air bag is a “supplemental” restraint system, one intended primarily to protect against injury when the car hits something or is struck head on. That type of crash causes about half of all traffic fatalities, they say, while lap and shoulder belts offer protection in nearly every type of crash. “You really need both,” Parr said.
Auto makers say that, although they are convinced of the benefits of air bags, they cannot immediately equip entire fleets with two front-seat units because parts supplies are limited and engineers must first plan such a system for each model--a time-consuming job that involves redesigning steering columns, steering wheels and dashboards.
“Each car has its own system,” said Jack Dinan, a General Motors spokesman.
Chrysler Corp. already equips all of its North American-made cars with driver’s-side air bags, and plans to add them on the passenger’s side within the next three model years.
