Quote Originally Posted by 9large View Post
I don't think there's any need for the sarcasm, but your logic is flawed. I think Aus puts it well.

I don't understand why something so obvious needs to be spelt out, but for those who like facts and figures:


My response was due to your over dramatic 'trisection' of your head comment, not that airbags don’t work. But if you actually did want to know how much airbags save lives, read into it as road safety is actually a very interesting topic. The 29% figure and 28,000 people figures are all well and good and look great as headlines, but if you delve slightly deeper you will see that solely using crash statistics to come up with figures is the close equivalent of my nonchalant comment I posted earlier.

The statistical drop in fatalities that is trumpeted to be due to airbags in your links is affected greatly by the state by state compulsory seat belt laws in the US over the same time and the difficulty of clearly setting out if someone was saved by the airbag or the seat belt. Interesting reading is the following paper from 2001 -

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittPorter2001.pdf

To quote and paraphrase "We found that wearing a seat belt reduced the chance of death by 60-70 percent across all crashes. We estimated that air bags reduce the death rate by 15 percent in frontal crashes, but don’t help in partial frontal, side, or rear crashes."

Interesting and funny in a dark way is that drunk drivers are 7-10% less likely to die in accidents than sober drivers as they generally don't see the accident about to occur and therefore don't tense up and stiffly hold onto the steering wheel. Therefore statistics show that airbags are a 5-8% better overall at saving your life than driving after drinking a bottle of vodka (obviously ignoring the fact that drinking a bottle of vodka will probably increase your chance of an accident in the first place by a massive amount).

By the way, in no way am I saying that airbags are not needed, the more safety features the better. I have lost 3 friends (including my girlfriend at the time) due to car accidents that would have been avoidable if only for better driver training and in one case, better roads. The cars had airbags and seatbelts, but they are only there when you have the accident

Herein lies my problem, passive safety features unfortunately lull us into a false sense of security, it is easier for a government to mandate such features (and past on the cost to the driver) than to actually spend money on ensuring our roads are in good condition and that the people that receive licenses actually have the ability to drive in emergency situations.
The risk of having an accident is not lowered by you having an airbag, it could actually be argued that having all these safety systems will increase your chance of an accident. You can lower you risk of death or injury by being a better driver, not driving like an idiot and governments ensuring roads are in better condition. If someone were to refuse to drive a car because it didn’t have an airbag fitted, I would never be a passenger in their car, to me it says that they have a very high expectation of an accident, I’d rather not be in one thanks.
Massively off topic I know, but having read quite a bit on road safety over the years, I don’t mind having the odd chat about it.

Back on topic though, someone suggested that if you did change the wheel to wear a harness, I would suggest not to, not only is it illegal (at least in Vic), but if fitted correctly (no slack) it impairs your side and back vision greatly as you cannot move your shoulders to move your head and in traffic it is downright dangerous.