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Leave a Comment Side Air Bags


The Issues

Many major automobile manufacturers have introduced side air bags in some of their vehicle models, to provide better protection to vehicle occupants' heads, and sometimes torsos, in side-impact collisions. There is no Federal statute or regulation that requires that side air bags be included in vehicles or that prescribes technical features or performance standards for side air bags. The regulatory policy issues that concern the CRE are whether the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should issue regulations:

  1. Requiring side air bags in vehicles; or

  2. Establishing technical or performance standards for side air bags.

These regulatory policy issues must be assessed, in part, in light of recent history regarding legal requirements (including NHTSA's performance regulations) for, and actual crash experience involving, front-mounted air bags. A Federal statute requires that all new passenger cars and light trucks (meaning minivans, sport utility vehicles, and pick-up trucks) sold in the U.S. have air bags for the driver and the outboard front passenger position. Those bags are front-mounted, in the steering wheel and the front dashboard.

NHTSA issued regulations establishing performance standards that the front-mounted bags must meet to protect occupants in frontal-impact collisions. One performance requirement is that an air bag must be capable of protecting (meaning limiting injury to a specified level of force exerted on specified parts of the body, as measured on crash test dummies) an unbelted 50th-percentile male (approximately 160 pounds) in a crash in which a real vehicle strikes a solid barrier head-on at 30 mph with no pre-crash braking. That requirement determines, in part, the amount of force with which an air bag deploys; other factors including the "threshold" of crash severity at which the air bag deploys and whether the bag can deploy with lesser or greater force depending upon the severity of the crash also are relevant. Unfortunately, there are documented instances in which vehicle occupants, usually children or petite women, were seriously or fatally injured by the force of a deploying air bag, in crashes that should have resulted in significantly lesser injury or should have been survivable. The issue is complex, in part because virtually all of the fatally injured persons were "too close" to the air bag at the instant of deployment, usually because the person was not secured in a seat belt or was out of proper position (for example, was leaning forward to adjust a radio) when the air bag deployed.

As the result of those air bag-related injuries and fatalities, NHTSA is currently conducting the "Advanced Air Bags" rulemaking, in which NHTSA re-examined the existing standards for front-mounted air bags and proposed certain new standards. NHTSA's goal is to establish new standards that will maximize the benefits that front air bags can provide for occupant safety in passenger cars and light trucks while reducing the risks posed to occupants by the air bags themselves.

Regulatory policy decisions regarding possibly mandating installation of, or technical or performance standards for, side air bags need to be based on good information regarding:

  1. The extent to which side air bags become installed as standard equipment in vehicles sold in the U.S.;

  2. The performance of side air bag systems in protecting vehicle occupants; and

  3. Whether the side air bags cause unintended and avoidable injury to occupants.

According to NHTSA, at present about three-quarters of automakers are installing front and/or rear side air bags as standard equipment or offering them as optional equipment in at least some of their model year 1999 vehicles. According to a Consumer Reports magazine survey of model year 1999 vehicles, side air bags are standard on 45 models and optional on another 11 models. The number of models and total number of vehicles equipped with side air bag systems is projected to increase substantially over the next two to three years. To date, experience with the side air bag systems indicates that, with very limited reported exceptions, they do provide improved protection in side- impact crashes and they do not cause injury to occupants when they deploy.


CRE's Position

CRE's view is that at present, NHTSA should allow the industry to pursue industry's stated preference for developing voluntary harmonized international standards for side air bag systems.

NHTSA should monitor the introduction of the side air bag systems into the U.S. vehicle fleet, and should consider issuing regulations to mandate side air bags as standard equipment or to establish mandatory technical or performance standards for side air bags only if there is clear evidence that:

  1. Side air bags provide significantly improved occupant protection at reasonable economic cost and market forces will not, within a few years, result in making side air bags standard equipment in a large majority of new cars and light trucks; or

  2. The voluntary industry standards fail to:

    1. Provide a satisfactory minimum level of protection to vehicle occupants in side-impact collisions; or

    2. Minimize injury to vehicle occupants as the result of deployment of the side air bags.

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