Joan Claybrook, former NHTSA administrator during 1977-81, issued the
first series of air bag mandates. Later, as head of Naderite group
Public Citizen,
she pressured Congress to require air bags on all new cars. A Public
Citizen press release now claims that she, along with other auto
safety advocates, "today revealed documents dating back to the 1970s
which showed that the current ... child injury problems with air bags
were foreseen by auto industry tests." Yet Ms. Claybrook was
instrumental in suppressing and dismissing any studies suggesting that
air bags were less than completely safe, insisting that the auto
companies' concerns represented a spurious and irresponsible effort to
undermine public confidence in air bag safety. She recently complained
to the Washington Monthly of Detroit's failure to "see the human cost
of not implementing the airbag." Now, in a Washington Post
op-ed, the subject of her outrage has shifted: "Despite the knowledge
of the performance of the air bags they designed, promoted and are
selling to the public, the auto companies until now have not
explicitly warned occupants with an obvious and unequivocal label on
the dashboard."
To date, more than 30 children have been killed by air-bag deployment, many of them in low-speed accidents—twice as many as the number of children saved. In addition, the estimated number of adult lives saved by air bag mandates—2,500 to 3,000—is about one quarter of the originally projected number, and is offset by a similar number of lives lost annually due to the downsizing effect of fuel-efficiency mandates.
[Ed.: Fearing lawsuits, many dealers later refused to deactivate the airbags. Later, in 1998, an Ohio man was jailed for not deactivating the bag following a crash that killed his two-month-old son.]
