I drove cars without airbags for most of my life. I even still have a car without airbags. Whether it's a good idea or not is debatable, but your statement that it's dangerous doesn't resonate with me. Airbags are a false sense of security and may or may not help you and were originally devised as a way to help drivers who don't use their seat belts. Airbags certainly do run the cost and complexity of cars way up, however. In the past, airbags have injured drivers and can go off unexpectedly (and even killed people when doing so).
survivorship bias. Yes, airbags can have faults that can cause injury. But having them is still safer than not having them. Just because you survived in a car without airbags and some other individual (even many) got injured or killed by an airbag is not evidence that people in general are safer without airbags. You need to assess risk/benefit based on a statistically valid sample size.
That's not to say we shouldn't work on safer airbags, especially for children, or hold manufacturers accountable for faults/failures; of course we should. But saying cars are somehow safer without airbags flies in the face of the available evidence.
[edit] I realize you didn't explicitly say that airbags are not safe ('good idea or not is debatable', 'may or may not'), but you strongly imply that with 'Airbags are a false sense of security'.
"To get the rule, which was opposed by the auto industry because it would add cost to vehicles, Dole promised it would be rescinded if states that accounted for two-thirds of the population passed laws requiring seat belt use."
First time I had ever heard of the last part of that quote. A quick check shows 30 states have primary seatbelt laws. As these include all the big states (NY, CA, TX, FL,...) I would have to think we are at 2/3 of the population.
The claim as phrased is somewhat suspicious, since it's a regulatory rule and the industry had no firm ability to prevent the department from issuing the regulation (they could lobby against it, or try to get allies in Congress to exercise a legislative veto.) Such a promise may have been a political effort to soften the blow, but I don't see any argument that, even if she was morally obligated to follow through on the promise while she was Secretary, it would be even morally binding on a later Secretary, especially in a different administration. And, legally, if the condition isn't in the regulation or somewhere else legally binding, a politicians promise of repeal is meaningless.
> Airbags certainly do run the cost and complexity of cars way up
That's not the case (emphasis on the "way up" part). The average new car price is over $33,000 in the US. Airbags, including side curtains, are a trivial portion of that cost. Even if you averaged it all out by including all airbag deployments and the cost to replace them, you're talking about a net 1%-2% of the cost of a new vehicle's purchase price (much less if we were to count the total expenditures across the lifetime of the vehicle, including fuel and routine maintenance).
"NHTSA estimates that when side curtain airbags become standard to meet the new side impact regulations in 2013, the airbags will add about $33 to the overall cost of the vehicle. Side curtains are slightly more expensive from OEM suppliers than traditional chest airbags (which cost about $50 apiece, on average) [source: Automotive News]"
The need for the side columns to have a degree of strength is a bigger problem for visibility that the bulk added by side curtains.
Driving '60 and 70's cars was great for visibility due to the amount of glass and narrow pillars. The risk of dying in a relatively low speed accident was less ideal.
My girlfriend's 2006? Subaru Legacy had thinner columns than her 2013 model. Not sure by how much, but it was very noticeable at first and I still find I sometimes miss seeing things in the new car that I never had a problem with in the old one. Maybe they are wider now for strength and side air bags. In any case, maximizing cars for crash-test-dummy preservation may not minimize for human harm due to car accidents. With automatic cars this may be not be a very big problem, but they are still a ways off, I think.
Well, when back over accidents became more common because the safety arms race gave vehicles rear visibility only slightly better than a Panzer the government mandated backup cameras.
Self driving cars will probably take over before "front blind spot detection" becomes a thing.
People drove around in cars with no seat belts, solid dashboards, craptastic drum brakes, and other great features along those lines, and most of them survived. The cars were still outrageously dangerous.
Deaths per passenger-mile in the 1960s were about 5x greater than they are today. Traffic fatalities made up about 2.5% of all deaths at the time, even though people drove far less than they do now. I'm quite happy to call that "outrageous."
I assume you're trying to call attention to confounding factors like improved medical care. That's really tough to answer, because 60-year-old cars today aren't driven the way they were when they were new, and they're benefitting from modern tires and brake materials.
I'm sure there are analyses out there of the probability of serious injury or death in various crash scenarios in various types of cars.
Are those numbers adjusted for alcohol consumption and how difficult it is for young people to get their licenses? T
There's a reason your age is the biggest factor in your car insurance premium.
Making it statistically less likely for a car full of drunk teenagers to go off a cliff on their way to prom affects road fatality statistics the same way decreases in infant mortality increases life expectancy.
The primary reduction in traffic fatalities is due to keeping "undesirable people" off the roads, increases in vehicle performance (modern cars can stop on and turn a relative dime compared to cars from decades ago)that turn many accidents into close calls.
Chasing safety is a lot like fuel economy. It's a steady march of small improvements all of which are compromises. I and many other people don't want to be injured in a likely accident scenario for a small reduction in the likelihood of death in an unlikely accident scenario. I also don't want the spare tire of my SUV under the trunk floor where I can't access it without removing cargo just to get .01 extra mpg.
