<VV> Fwd: New Car Black Boxes - No Corvair

[Ken Pepke]

Frank:

The numbers came from a discussion between a couple of GM engineers that were directly involved in the program.  This study was done shortly after the first MANDATED airbags were on the market.  They had collected thousands of deployments.  The test was looking for effectiveness of the airbags by sorting out accidents in which the airbag had deployed even though the accident was probably survivable compared to how many of the deployments actually resulted in saving a life.  Sorry you don't like the results but they showed that at time there were NO / ZERO lives saved.  The unexpected revelation by their study was that the airbags had actually killed 123 persons, 57 of which were children.  Those were the results they took to the government.

Unknown is the number of deployments that were unknown to them or those in which the data was not collectable. 

As far as the improvement in safety, I will give the greatest amount of credit to metallurgical development with design taking a close second.  Perhaps airbags may have some small part but, we see the same safety improvements in NASCAR and other forms of racing even though they DO NOT employ airbags at all!

Ken P
Wyandotte, MI
65 Monza 110hp 4 speed 2 door
Worry looks around; Sorry looks back, Faith looks up.

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On Dec 8, 2012, at 1:39 PM, Frank DuVal wrote:

> Ken, I do not know where you got that statistic from, but it is 
> obviously wrong. The number saved can not be 0. You could make up a 
> number that might be believed, but zero?
> 
> One just needs to look at the number of automobile deaths per year in 
> this country to see that something has changed over 50 years. Of course, 
> many things have changed. But, speeds, number of miles driven, number of 
> cars on the road, and number of crashes has increased. Lives are being 
> saved. Air bags are just one of the reasons. But they are a reason.  We 
> killed 50,000 people per year in the 60s and now just kill 30,000 people 
> per year.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year
> 
> Here in Virginia, in the IIHS lobby, we have the two Chrysler vehicles 
> that were in the FIRST head on accident between two cars, both outfitted 
> with driver side airbags. You can touch them and study how damaged they 
> are. Real life crash, not done in the laboratory.  These are 1989 Chryslers.
> 
> Results were: lives saved 2, deaths 0. These were first generation airbags.
> 
> I remember the news report from the accident, the trooper was expecting 
> to see dead people in the cars (head on collision on a rural road 55 mph 
> limit) and started asking the two people standing by what they had seen 
> about the crash, then  found out they were the drivers!
> 
> http://articles.dailypress.com/1990-03-31/news/9003310059_1_air-bags-bags-or-automatic-seat-driver-s-side-air
> 
> Yes, out of the 700,000+ people killed in crashes between 1990 and 208, 
> 290 or so were caused by the airbag going off in low speed crashes. 
> Kinda small number. Of course if it is you, then the statistic is large!
> 
> Frank DuVal
> 
> On 12/8/2012 8:49 AM, Ken Pepke wrote:
>> The proverbial 'black box' has been with cars since the inception of the air bag safety device.  They were collected by the manufacturers after a deployment.  They served to supply airbag feedback to the engineers.  Information collected was used to computer simulate the 'bag effectiveness.  After quite a few fatal accidents the score was:  Death by airbag deployment … 120+, saves by airbag … 0.   This information gave the engineers the material to force the government to allow them to change the designs to the '
>> second Generation' type which we now use.
>> 
>> Ken P