Air Bags and Auto Safety

B. Air bag solution air bags improve auto safety

V. Insurance industry position on air bags

B. Position, debate, future action by insurance companies

A. Summary of costs for consumer and industry

The use of passive restraints (air bags) in automobiles offers great potential for reducing deaths and serious injuries on the roads in the United States. Seat belt systems, presently required by most states, are effective only when properly used. However, many studies show that less than 20 per cent of automobiles drivers and passengers use their seat belts ("Auto" 1). Since the early 1970s, there has been debate over requiring automobile manufacturers to install mandatory air bags in every automobile sold in the United States. In 1977, for example, the Secretary of Transportation mandated passive front seat restraint systems (U.S. Congress 1). Yet even with this mandate it was not until September 1989 that automobile manufacturers found it necessary to comply with federally mandated regulations ("Air" 8).

Simply put, air bags work. They were installed and tested on sever

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t engineers relied on this test (76.2 percent of the tests were in the frontal mode) was that they believed that it was "the most severe test for a restraint system" ("The Air" 18). Results of frontal tests show air bags to be an excellent restraint system under laboratory conditions. There are three variables, however, which enter into the test data: 1. Laboratory crash conditions provide a simplified and limited simulation of real crash conditions. 2. Emphasis on testing air bag systems in small cars is lacking and extrapolating test data derived from large cars to small cars is difficult. 3. Biomechanical knowledge about human responses in crashes and human tolerances to injuries is limited (U.S. Congress 29-30). Although the limitations of testing using the frontal mode were recognized, "some of the test data [also] indicated satisfactory performance outside the full frontal crash mode" (U.S. Congress 22). Actual field experience with air bags numbers about 12,000 automobiles ("The Air" 21). Of that number, 334 reported accidents with air bags deployed in 205 of the cases (U.S. Congress 29-30). The results of the study were analyzed by factors such as direction of impact, area of vehicle damage, type o
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Approximate Word count = 2179
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)