The evidence cited below, plus a lot of other confirming evidence.
Good grief! You're not even willing to do the research when someone spoon feeds you the references. I guess this is all pretty useless.
Compared to the 45 percent offered by seat belts, yes that's very little additional protection. Plus you have to factor in the increased risk of injury at lower levels of severity.
Not hardly. However the statistics show that you are more likely to suffer lesser degrees of injury if air bags deploy than if they do not deploy.
Untrue, according to the numbers. If you are involved in a crash you are more likely to suffer injury if you have an air bag and it deploys in all but crashes that produce the most severe (Level 6 -- almost certainly non-survivable) injuries.
Well, no. The term 'statisticaly insignifcant' means that it is simply too close to call. Within the margin of error for the sample. It could well be statistical noise. You can't draw any conclusions from it.
However if you break it down the picture becomes even worse.
The 7 percent may not exist at all. That's the point of 'statistically insignificant.' Note also that the 9 percent includes the people in higher risk categories, such as very short people and children. Since I don't fall into those categories, I am at even lower risk.
Okay. But your implication is still incorrect. American manufacturers (GM) started putting air bags in cars in 1985, years before they were formally required. So the Europeans were not ahead of the Americans.
Their primary motivation was more likely the same as the GM's -- They knew air bags were probably coming and they needed to get experience with them. The usual way to do this is to phase it in on high-end cars as an option.
Or are you seriously going to suggest that big auto manufacturers are more alturistic if their headquarters are in other countries? I haven't noticed an upsurge in corporate citizenship since Dailmer bought Chrysler.
Nope. 9 percent for all drivers in fatalities -- traded off for a greater risk of lesser injuries. And a statistically insignificant 'improvement' -- which may or may not be a statistical artifact in injuries in all categories.
Yet you seem to be ignoring it. In this thread.
In fact it was my EMT instructor (IIRC) who first pointed this phenomenon out to me. He stressed the fact that even though belted drivers didn't hit the wheel or the dash, it was important to handle them as if they had suffered internal injuries because a lot of them had.
However I don't propose to match my long-expired Level 1 EMT certificate against your experience. My instructor's point was confirmed by a search of the literature.
While there is a lot on seat belt injuries, I was unable to find a single reference to steering wheel or dashboard injuries to drivers wearing the now-standard 3-point harness.
I don't doubt your story, but again the research indicates that this is extremely rare.
And again, you're more likely to suffer Level 5 or below trauma if your air bag deploys than if you're simply using a seat belt.
Okay, so you're not talking about a crash where the driver is thrown forward into the steering wheel. You're talking about an accident where the entire structure of the car is deformed and the passenger compartment collapses. That wasn't clear from your original statement.
However judging from the literature this is a tiny percentage of accidents. Again, there's nothing I could find on seat belt injuries from contact with the dash or steering wheel.
It also seems to me that an air bag isn't going to do a lot for you in that case. It may prevent the initial violent impact, but you're still going to get crushed as the structure (and the air bag) collapses.
But unlike the hard data, that's just my opinion.
Dozens of them. I was a police reporter. As a court reporter I also sat through the lawsuits that followed, including reconstructions of crashes and crah injuries.
Again, your position isn't supported by the evidence.
If someone can point these problems out to me I'd be very interested. Since you can't even be bothered to read the references and your grasp the concept of 'statistical insignificance' is non-existant, any such problems that might exist are pretty obviously beyond you.
Nope. The 7 percent may well be a statistical artifact. But when you break injuries down by category, you find a higher percentage of injuries for airbag versus belted drives at every category but level
- >> Besides, if your seat belt is properly adjusted you won't hit the >> steering wheel. >
Not according to the evidence. If this happens there's no refererence to it in the literature.
Also, if I understand you, in the cases you're talking about the driver didn't hit the steering wheel, the steering wheel hit the driver.
I'm making my decision based on the facts as I know them, buttessed by the research I have done.
person.
And the people injured by air bags might differ from your opinion.
Since she was belted in, she would not have hit the wheel. That's the point of 3-point restraints and they're very effective.
Wrong.
Google for 'seat belt injuries' 'steering wheel' and 'dashboard' and see what you find.
I keep repeating it because it is true.
Again, you're talking about the dash or wheel hitting the occupants, not vice-versa.
And since it's such an obvious proposition, how about some references to how air bags prevent injuries in such cases? If you're correct, that should be a no-brainer. Except I can't find anything like that. And I have looked.
--RC
Projects expand to fill the clamps available -- plus 20 percent