Air bags fit to kill

By Eric Peters Copyright 1999 Washington Times June 8, 1999

Whatever it is you do to earn a sawbuck, be very glad you don't have to build cars for a living. For General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and all the rest, it's a constant battle with lawyers and government regulators - each of them pulling at separate ends of the wishbone.

One of these days, they'll get their wish - and the bone will snap.

Behold the ongoing air bag fiasco. It is a circus sideshow of corporate life in late 20th-century America. You'll not find a better example of damned if you do, damned if you don't, Kafkesque bizarro in the history of American business.

It's a wonder the engineers don't just say to heck with it and call it a day.

General Motors first brought air bag technology to market back in the early 1970s - but few air bag-equipped cars were sold and the idea was shelved for lack of consumer interest. No one remembers this fact, of course - as GM (and the others) continue to be derided to this very day for "dragging their feet" when it comes to offering the latest safety gizmos.

During the Carter years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), under the direction of then-administrator Joan Claybrook, browbeat the auto makers for not pushing air bags more aggressively. People do remember that. Bad old General Motors. . . .

Ultimately, a passive restraint requirement was enacted that effectively required the installation of air bags as mandatory safety equipment on all new passenger cars (later expanded to include light trucks, SUVs and minivans, too).

So the auto makers dutifully installed them.

By the mid-1990s, air bags had become commonplace. And people were getting smacked up by them pretty badly.

Those first generation air bags were designed to halt the forward momentum of an unbuckled front seat passenger and deployed at speeds up to 200 mph, opening violently, within a fraction of a second. The force of the deployment could (and did) snap necks, tear out eyeballs and otherwise maim and kill. The elderly, small-statured women and young children - particularly infants - were especially vulnerable. To date, more than 115 people have been laid low as a direct result of air bag deployments; thousands have been injured, many of them severely and permanently.

Guess who got the blame? The auto makers, of course - even though it was the government that required the air bags in the first place and which decided that they should be powerful enough to restrain unbuckled occupants.

Industry experts tried in vain to explain to NHTSA back in the 1970s, during the NHTSA hearings and comment period, that air bags capable of arresting the forward momentum of an unbuckled front seat passenger (exactly what NHTSA expected the bags to be able to do) would be inherently dangerous to the aforementioned categories of people.

The engineers were stupendously ignored. Madame de Claybrook, a former protg of the self-styled, self-appointed consumer advocate Ralph Nader, dismissed the warnings, declaiming with all the engineering wisdom that years of service as a tub-thumping, know-nothing do-gooder can confer that air bags were "the best way" to protect unbuckled passengers and children in frontal impacts.

Her posturing and incompetence matter not at all. No one blames Joan Claybrook (or the federal government) for the mounting air bag body count. No class action lawsuits are directed at her.

Perhaps her pockets are not sufficiently deep. DaimlerChrysler was recently ordered to pay out $730 to every person in the state of Pennsylvania - some 82,000 people - who owns a Chrysler car built during the model years 1988-1990 by a Philadelphia court. Madame de Claybrook's probably couldn't afford that.

The Pennsylvania case centered on secondary injuries suffered by a woman who was involved in an accident in her air bag equipped Chrysler LeBaron back in 1992. Louise Crawley of Philadelphia walked away from the accident with minor burn injuries to her left wrist. The burns were caused by the venting of hot gasses used to inflate the bag.

The basis for Mrs. Crawley's claim against DaimlerChrysler is that the company is responsible for secondary injuries (skin burns, in her case) resulting from the air bag's deployment.

Other auto makers could face similar legal actions since such injuries are both fairly common and fairly likely given the nature of an air bag deployment. This holds true even for so-called second-generation air bags, which deploy with less force than the original batch. Pillows these things are not.

In point of fact, more people have been injured and killed by air bags than have been harmed or killed by known defects that have been subject to huge recalls and multimillion dollar legal actions, such as the exploding Pinto fiasco or the unsafe- at-any-speed Chevy Corvair Mr. Nader rode to national prominence.

Yet no admission of error is conceded by the government; no remission of legal attack is in the offing. If anything, the legal pile-on is likely to get worse as multiple permutations of the basic air bag concept (e.g., side curtain air bags, intelligent air bags that size up the size and weight of the occupant, etc.) flood the market, each with its own set of potential liabilities and problems - many of them not yet imagined.

The public, meanwhile, has been alarmingly gulled into believing that air bags are utterly benign; that they pose little or no risk to a car's occupants - much like safety belts and padded dashboards.

But this is bunk and twiddle. An air bag is inherently dangerous -unlike a seat belt.

In order for the air bag to work, it must violently intervene between the person in the car and the oncoming rush of twisted metal, plastic and glass. Injuries will inevitably happen. Expecting to step away from a major accident with no more than rumpled hair - as Mrs. Crawley and the others suing the auto makers seem to expect - is simply not realistic.

Industry experts wanted to warn the public of the risks and trade-offs presented by air bags - but the government prevented them from doing so, arguing this would be alarmist.

The bottom line is that no one wins - except the lawyers - who may be the only one left standing when the whole thing is over with.

Eric Peters, an editorial writer for The Washington Times, is a nationally automotive syndicated columnist.

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