Fighting Uncle Sam is an untenable proposition. He's got The Bomb and millions of minions to back him up. The auto industry has finally figured this out. After decades of resistance to such things as mandatory air bags and CAFE-downsized cars, our friends in Michigan have turned on the proverbial dime and now warmly embrace the cold corpse of Washington.
The American Automobile Manufacturer's Association - the lobbying arm of the Big Three domes tic automakers - recently sent out to auto scribes a glossy press kit chock full of encomiums for the once hated air bag.
Material included in the kit from such erstwhile mortal enemies as Ralph Nader's, Public Citizen and the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, cheerily trumpet the miraculous devices - which GM, at least, used to oppose because of the dangers posed to infants and others revealed during crash testing conducted in the 1970s.
Nowadays, mum's the word.
Why is this? Well, if you'd invested millions in tooling and engineering to incorporate dual air bags in every passenger car and light truck you built, admitting this was a bad idea and giving people the option of not buying the potentially dangerous "safety" devices -or turning them off - wouldn't be on your list of things to do either.
"Permission to deactivate an air bag a critical safety device - should be limited to the relatively few who truly need it and not given to everyone who mistakenly [italics mine] desires it," ballyhooes a joint letter to Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater signed by AAMA, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers and - surprise! - air bag enthusiast Joan Claybrook herself.
According to these fine folks, the many children who've had their necks snapped were mistaken to want the air bags that killed them turned off. After all, they're a critical safety device, you know.
And so, not only are we saddled with the cost of air bags - estimated at $600-$1,000 per car - we are not to be given the option of a switch to turn the things off by their lordships in government and Dearborn.
A major PR juggernaut is under way as this is written to convince the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to rule that consumers may not deactivate their air bags, irrespective of legitimate concerns about their dangerous tendency to decapitate infants and maim adults.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, composed a dismissive letter to President Clinton Sept. 2 in which the scores of deaths racked up by air bags are not even mentioned.
"I write now to re-emphasize our opposition to the proposal to allow deactivation of air bags or the retroactive installation of manual cut-off devices," said Dr. Robert E Hannemann.
Remember when pediatricians opposed things that were demonstrably fatal to children?
"We believe permitting dealers and repair shops to 'deactivate the air bag of any owner who requests it' would be bad public policy that could result in an overall degradation of safety," chirped Miss Claybrook in a similar letter - co-signed, ironically, by Diane Steed of the Coalition for Vehicle Choice (CVC).
There was a time when CVC actively championed the interests of consumers and motorists.
You know things are getting smelly when the car industry is playing kissy face with Miss Claybrook. Maybe one of the Big Three will even offer her a position in research and development. Lord knows we could all benefit from her tremendous storehouse of engineering knowledge.
Meanwhile, the threat of litigation will probably do NHTSA's dirty work for it. No dealer or mechanic is going to be stupid enough to deactivate anybody's air bag and open himself up thereby to a lawsuit when the driver has an accident later and blames any injuries on him for deactivating "an important safety device."
You can't prove a negative, so any potential lives saved by deactivated bags will go unnoticed from a statistical point of view - while any person who survives an accident in an air-bag-equipped car will of course be considered alive only because of the presence of the air bag.
The automakers have seen the light. It's not hard to understand why. Too bad they're increasingly more in the business of placating Washington than offering the best deal to consumers.
Eric Peters writes on automotive issues for The Washington Times and the North American Auto Writers Syndicate.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of the author.
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