The fatal, unintended consequences of airbags

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This seems an apt moment to pause to consider the air bag, a safety device that has surely saved lives – and also taken many.

You may have been following with growing concern what observers are calling "a deepening crisis involving deadly airbags" that has led to the recall of 7.8 million vehicles in the United States. Auto makers from Nissan Motor to Toyota, Mazda, BMW and General Motors have been linked to an issue with airbags from the supplier, Takata. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is advising owners to "act immediately on recall notices to replace defective Takata airbags."

Transport Canada, for its part, has issued a number of airbag recalls, warning that, for example, "On certain vehicles, the passenger (frontal) airbag inflator could produce excessive internal pressure during airbag deployment. Increased pressure may cause the inflator to rupture, which could allow fragments to be propelled toward vehicle occupants, increasing the risk of injury."

In other words, if the airbag in certain models explodes to prevent an injury, it may in fact cause one. One particular recall from June 2014 covers 107,339 2002-2004 Toyota and Lexus models – Lexus SC 430, and Toyota Corolla, Matrix, Sequoia and Tundra. (Contact Toyota Canada at 1-888-869-6828 for more information). There are more. The number of vehicles involved across vehicle lines is staggering.

Airbags have saved countless lives and have reduced injuries in traffic accidents. They have also been responsible for many injuries and fatalities. Indeed, as far back as 1996, at the height on one airbag crisis, I wrote a story about airbags which said that, according to NHTSA, since 1990, deploying airbags had killed 24 children and 19 adults.

So we are into our third decade of airbags killing people. How has it come to pass that a safety device has also been a killer? We can, in large measure, thank William Haddon and his acolytes, Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook, for this sad state of affairs.

Haddon, as author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, was the man who "changed forever the way Americans think about car accidents" by shifting much of the focus on traffic safety away from educating and training drivers to the vehicle itself. Drivers could not be trusted to drive safely, so the only sensible thing to do was to make cars safer, independent of whatever drivers and passengers chose to do or not do.

In his June 2001 article titled Wrong Turn, Gladwell noted that Haddon was a medical doctor trained at the Harvard School of Public Health who, in the 1950s, grabbed the attention of then-New York State governor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a powerful presidential aide and U.S. senator. Haddon, as Gladwell writes, "considered the driver unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error," therefore, "the best safety measures were passive."

As Gladwell notes, these ideas resonated with Moynihan, a liberal Democrat who went to work for President Lyndon Johnson in the Department of Labour. There he hired Harvard-educated lawyer Ralph Nader, a disciple of Haddon's ideas, to work on traffic-safety issues. Nader recruited congressional aide Joan Claybrook to the growing list of those bent on bringing life to Haddon's ideas and principles in government legislation.

Nader's 1965 book, Unsafe at any Speed, triggered what Gladwell describes as a "Haddon crusade" that swept Washington. Government hearings begat new, extensive and, honestly, welcome government regulations covering vehicles themselves – from safety glass to collapsible steering columns, from padded instrument panels to doors with side-impact beams. Haddon himself became commissioner of the newly-established National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with Claybrook his special assistant.

And so Gladwell gives us this compelling story behind what then-senator Warren Magnuson called a powerful idea: a crash without an injury. The United States vigorously pursued "passive" safety. The idea has long been to take drivers out of the equation as much as possible. They can't be trusted.

Which brings us to airbags. Nader, as Gladwell writes, didn't trust people to buckle up on their own, and with good reason. As Claybrook told him, "They (seatbelts) were terribly designed, and people didn't use them." The airbag would be, as Nader described in Unsafe at any Speed, "a superior passive safety design which would come into use only when needed, and without active participation of the occupant."

The "Haddonites," as Gladwell calls them, "wanted the airbag to replace the seat belt..." even though there has long been ample evidence to show that well-engineered seatbelts are superb safety devices, and that airbags work best when employed in conjunction with the use of seat belts. You need only look at race cars, where drivers are buckled in and are protected wonderfully well without air bags.

Airbags are here to stay and the current problems will be righted, though that is not to underplay the seriousness of this latest spate of recalls. Let's not, however, overlook the cautionary tale airbags offer.

We live in an age of over-reliance and excessive trust in technology, a time when we're led to believe that technology will save us from ourselves – just as the Haddonites believed that the passive safety approach is best because it takes humans out of the traffic safety equation. These ideas brought us airbags with all the good and bad they do.

As government regulators contemplate new and additional safety regulations, in particular legislation covering the use of self-driving or driverless cars – cars that take humans out of the equation entirely – the story of airbags is important to remember. There will be unintended consequences by further eliminating the driver from driving and, at times, those consequences are fatal.

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