sjlee said:
Actually airbags were actually designed with the passenger wearing a seatbelt. Those passengers not wearing a seat belt could actually sustain more injuries in an accident if they weren't wearing a seatbelt. Side airbags and curtains are a relatively new safety feature that was introduced in a time when wearing a seatbelt is required by law in most states.
Race cars also have reinforced roll cages and the drivers wear helmets and safety harnesses (not seatbelts). The reason why race cars don't have ABS and airbags isn't because they don't think they provide more safety... it's because they want to reduce as much weight in the car as possible.
I'm guessing that just about everyone would like to be 10% safer in an accident.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that in a multiple vehicle accident, the passengers in the bigger and heavier vehicle will likely sustain less injuries than the other vehicle... partly because the bigger and heavier vehnicle will do more damage to the other vehicle. However,
When I last took the Skip Barber road course
http://www.skipbarber.com , they pulled the fuses on the ABS on the school cars and trained us how to "beat" the ABS, that is to haul the car down quicker
without ABS than with the ABS functional. Of course we were focusing our attention on the task at hand, not jabbering on a cell phone, sipping a Starbucks Latte or fooling with the stereo. So I'd buy ABS on a car if it was optional. I'd have to guess that the reason a car with ABS is statistically less safe is the same reason that the AWD SUV is the car that's invariably on it's roof in the middle of the highway whenever it snows. Consciously or unconsciously the ABS is going to lead to a false sense of security. I doubt the ABS pump itself weighs more than a few pounds and in most racing classes the minimum weight is specified anyway, so if there were anything to be gained on a track by the ABS the race cars would have it. I know that in competitive events on the track cars usually have roll cages and harnesses and the drivers wear helmets but they also tend to slam into things at speeds that people rarely see on public highways.
When airbags were first introduced in the first GM cars in the early 1970s the reason was because
most drivers did not use their seat belts at the time. In 1974 the Feds even had the carmakers wire the seatbelts into the ignition so you couldn't start the car unless the seat belt was fastened. Congress killed this law within 6 months when they were swamped with letters from their annoyed constituents. (I remember the spaghetti-wiring under the front seat to bypass this "feature" on my '74 Dart.) Subsequently, state seatbelt laws have made airbags less important. While the side airbags are no doubt helpful in a collision with a taller vehicle, it is less clear that side airbags are more effective than driving another tall vehicle. In the Swedish crash test above there were no airbags that I could see deploying in the VW but the Microbus dummies didn't contact much of the Volvo except with their feet. The Volvo dummies contacted the Microbus with their heads and torsos.
Within any weight/size class of vehicles, the one with the most airbags
should be the best one to crash. But there remains a roughly linear relationship between the safety of a vehicle and it's mass. The dozen+ years of IIHS claims data support this. Large, tall, heavy, expensive vehicles are generally safer than small, low, light, cheap vehicles - with ABS and airbags or without them.
I would also think that a small manuverable vehicle might be safer than a large ponderous vehicle but both the IIHS injury rates and Driver Death Rates seem to contradict this.
If safety were the only factor, I'd drive something like an Excursion or a Humvee. But it's not, I enjoy carving corners, I like to drive fast, hiding in the "tall grass" of the SUVs and I hate throwing $$ in the gas tank and I'm willing to take some risks to do so. It's also probably safer to bludgeon my way through NYC rush hour traffic in a TSX than it would be to do so driving a Porsche or riding a Harley. The one certainty about life is that nobody gets out of it alive. The TSX (or a similar-sized sedan) is a "happy medium" for me. Your own "happy medium" may be different.
