Auto Makers May Make Head-Protecting Airbags Standard
U.S. auto makers,
seeking to avoid new federal regulations, are moving toward making head-protecting
air bags standard in all vehicles and altering the design of pickup
trucks and sport-utility vehicles to make them safer, Tuesday's Wall
Street Journal reported.
For consumers, the
changes are expected to mean better protection in certain kinds of crashes,
though not without some design and cost trade-offs. For example, SUV
and pickup drivers may find some models' fronts lowered, to make them
less likely to ride up over the hoods of lower-riding cars. New head-
protecting air bags could also raise vehicle prices by several hundred
dollars.
While a car's main
air bag is designed to prevent the driver from flailing forward into
the steering column, the head-protection devices are typically narrower
devices that deploy from the roof and protect the head from crashing
into the side window. They are already available as standard in some
models -- typically European and luxury makes -- and as options in more
than 50% of vehicles. However, fewer than 15% of those buyers choose
them.
As options, the
devices generally now sell for between $350 and $600, and sometimes
even into the thousands of dollars when sold as part of bigger packages.
Some 10,000 people
die annually in side-impact crashes, with the majority of those deaths
likely from head injuries, according to a 2001 study by the Insurance
Institute for Highway Safety, an industry group. The institute doesn't
estimate how those fatality numbers might be reduced if more head-protecting
air bags were in vehicles. But in the group's crash tests, head-protecting
air bags have been shown to significantly reduce the risk of head injury.
Details of the auto
industry's plans -- and how they would affect specific models -- are
likely to take months to work out, and even longer to phase in. Auto
makers typically require several model years to make extensive design
changes.
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