Short, Tall Passengers at Risk From Airbags

A new study being released tomorrow at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine says that extremely short and tall people are more at risk from airbags than protected by them. This is the first time there has been evidence that height plays a factor in car accidents.

The results were culled from 67,284 drivers and front passengers involved in car crashes over more than 11 years. It concluded that people shorter than 4 feet 11 inches and taller than 6 feet 3 inches were harmed by airbags. Weight was not a factor in injuries, according to the report. The one flaw with the report is that it doesn’t state how many of the injuries were in cars with newer “smart” airbags, and if they do a better job of protecting those of different height.

A separate study also being presented at this meeting states that young women are engaging in risky behavior behind the wheel. Between 1995 and 2004, the number of young women dying in alcohol-related accidents rose, while it decreased for young men.

Air Bags Dangerous for Tall, Small People: Study (Yahoo News)

Comments

Not a suprising report, I work in the collision repair industry and I see this all the time, but most of my customers would much rather have a broken wrist or bruised face or torso than the injuries or worse that would have occured had they not had airbags. Does this study include how many of the injured people were not wearing seatbelts? Injuries from airbags are far worse when you are stupidly not wearing a seatbelt.

I was in engineering school when airbags first arrived, and my instructors and I both wondered what the logic of putting a stick of dynamite in the steering wheel was. (An incentive NOT to crash perhaps?)

Gotta love 'Engineer Humor'

But I'm on my 4th car with an airbag since then and I've yet to 'fire one off'. So personaly I view them as a waste of my money.

The seatbelts work fine though!