Your Vehicle’s Airbags and the Controversy Surrounding Them

If you buy a car that doesn’t have airbags, it’s either very old, or else someone modified it and removed the airbags for some reason.

Most people would agree that airbags serve a useful purpose. However, some individuals have negative feelings on the topic. The NHTSA says airbags saved 50,000 lives over three decades, but that doesn’t convince everyone that they’re useful or that cars should feature them.

What’s behind the airbag controversy? We will look into it now on behalf of our Formula 1 readers interested in vehicle safety.

If you think about modern technology, there’s almost always someone who won’t like it, even if there’s no proof it ever did anything wrong. Think about how many people panicked right around the turn of the century because of Y2K. Consider how many individuals recently made a fuss about smartphone carrier companies switching from 4G to 5G.

There’s seemingly always a group of outliers who feel that some new invention might harm them. More times than not, they will talk about things like government conspiracies. In the modern era, it’s even more common. The internet’s darker corners talk about wild coverups that sound terrifying, despite these theorists having no real proof.

When seatbelts first came out, some drivers didn’t like the idea. They felt the technology violated their personal freedoms. Some continued feeling that way, even after seatbelts saved many lives.

Airbags have a slightly more complicated history, though. They’ve been around since the 1960s, when John W. Hetrick first came up with the idea. From there, a Japanese inventor named Yasuzaburou Kobori made considerably more reliable ones.

In 1998, the American government decided to make airbags mandatory in all new cars. They announced that all light trucks must feature them a year later.

When airbags first appeared, some of them killed people. That’s why some individuals still don’t trust them more than 60 years after inventors came up with the first crude ones.

If you look at the numbers, they might alarm you. Between 1990 and 2008, the NHTSA states that airbags killed more than 290 people, many in low-speed crashes. That’s alarming, and it makes it a little more credible when someone on the internet tells you they’re unsafe and that you should cut yours out of your vehicle if you buy a new one.

It’s probably extreme to think that way, but it’s not as though no airbag ever killed a person. That makes airbag worries somewhat more reasonable than 5G fears, for instance, which virtually every credible scientist calls unfounded.

If you think about airbag deaths and study many of them, you’ll see that older airbag models usually hurt or killed people when these accidents occurred more often. Older airbags deployed with much more force than you will see with modern ones.

However, the technology today and that of yesteryear don’t match up at all. Several decades of study have brought about new generations of airbags that probably won’t harm you like the old ones.

You can’t ever say that a product won’t harm you with absolute certainty. Still, much study and refinement mean you can probably feel a lot safer about modern airbags than the obsolete ones you’d get in a car several decades ago.

If you look at the airbag deaths from decades ago, you will also notice some similarities. In many instances, the airbag killed an infant or child. The parent almost always put the infant or child in the front seat next to them, which modern engineers understand endangers someone that age.

That is why you now see children in that age group in specialty car seats. These car seats also go in the back of a vehicle, where an airbag can’t deploy and harm the young passenger if a crash occurs.

In many cases, with airbag deaths from decades ago, the youngster in the front seat did not have a seatbelt on, either. That makes the situation at least in part the parent’s fault for not having their child strapped in.

No one can ever tell someone else how to think about any topic. You might lecture till you’re blue in the face about airbag safety, but it someone believes they’re harmful, they will likely keep believing it, no matter what you say or how many stats you give them.

All research indicates airbags have reached a point where they’re very safe, though. Also, it’s no longer possible to get a new vehicle that doesn’t have them, just like you can’t get a new car any longer that doesn’t come with seatbelts or a backup camera.

You might feel nervous about modern airbags, but you’re looking at nearly astronomical chances that one might harm you. Modern airbags have sensors that let them know when they should deploy, and they almost never malfunction. Also, even if one does, if you’re a fully grown adult, the bag might harm you, but it probably won’t kill you.

If you’re someone who worries about things a lot, then generalized anxiety might leave you in a condition where you don’t just fret about airbags, but also about terrorist attacks or alien invasions. You might understand that such things probably won’t happen, but there’s always that small chance that they may.

If you let your anxiety control you, though, then you might not ever feel safe getting in a car. You may never take a shower because you worry about slipping and falling.

Life has danger elements. That’s undeniable. If you focus too much on unlikely events potentially happening, though, you probably won’t ever enjoy anything.

It’s probably best to trust that modern engineers made airbags as safe as possible and to accept their existence.