About kids and car air bags

Factual Questions
1

Hi Dopers! Long time no see.

I have read/herd that the safest place for a child in a car is the middle of the back seat, and for obvious reasons. I have also heard that children and small adults can be killed sitting in the front seat when an air bag is deployed - killed by the air bag - breaks their neck. I have an (almost) 10 year old son, he is about 5 feet tall. He wants to sit up front with dad. When will he be big enough to do so with out fear of the air bag killing him? (Side impact is another risk, even with out air bags, but that is not my concern at the moment.)

Thanx!

2

No cite, but IIRC in the U.K. children under 12 aren’t supposed to be in the front seat at all unless they’re babies in a special rear-facing carrier.

3

Here is a link indicating that the 12 year old limit is not just a height and weight issue. It questions the child’s maturity and ability to sit still out of the deployment zone.

4

You should never put a child in any kind of carrier in the front seat… especially a rear facing carrier.

cite: http://www.aap.org/family/airbag.htm

5

From the NHTSA

Speaking as a guy who teaches airbag repair, and safety, I would say that about 5 feet is a little on the short side for the front seat. When my daughter was 10 ish she was about 5’5" and I would let her sit in the front seat, but I made sure the front seat was all the way back.
Please don’t forget that when you read that airbags are powerful devices, that is not hyperbole, it is a fact, and passenger airbags are big, often with a volume of 150 liters or more. For reference that is twice the size of a 20 gallon kitchen garbage bag.
So when you make your decision, remember the following[ul]
[li]airbags are fiast, they deploy so fast you cannot see the deployment.[/li][li]The inflating airbag is hard, it is designed to stop a full sized adult, not a child.[/li][li]If your child (or anyone else for that matter) is in the wrong place when the airbag fires, Mr airbag is no longer your friend.[/li][/ul]
Maybe you need to put up one of those signs like they used to have at amusement parks “You must be this tall to ride in the front seat” :slight_smile:

6

My two cents:

I’m a six-foot tall male who was hit in the front driver’s side (just forward of the door) by a vehicle doing about 50mph. (I have the seat all the way back.) Both front airbags went off (I was alone in the car) and I wound up with a torn and detached retina in my left eye. A rather common injury, according to my ophalmologist. That was six months and two surgeries ago. My vision is slowly returning.

Bottom line: Keep the kids in the back seat. (And wow, that passenger airbag is huge!)

7

Rick, I’d heard that 5’2" is the minimum safe height to sit behind an airbag. My question is this: my 14-year-old daughter is 5’1". She is done growing, as her height has not changed in over two years. She is NEVER going to be 5’2", let alone 5’6". If it is technically not safe for her to sit behind an airbag, how’s she supposed to drive safely when she turns 16?

Does it make a difference that I drive a Passat and the front seats can be raised and lowered? She rides with the seat raised as high as it will go, putting her head at about my height (5’7").

8

You do what you should do with any teenage driver…buy her an indestructable early 70s American full sized automobile. As long as she wears her seatbelt, she’ll be fine.

If she gets in a wreck, she’ll probably walk away without a scratch…there probably won’t be any body damage to the car, and if there is, who cares…the car’s 30 years old…also, the price of gasoline will probably discourage her from doing too much joy riding.

9

That’s the worst piece of advice I’ve ever seen. Modern car bodies are designed to crumple in a crash, so they can absorb the energy of the impact and that’s a good thing. A car that doesn’t crumple in a crash means that the passenger’s body will have to absorb more energy. Also, modern cars have things like airbags, seatbelts with pretensioners, better manouverability and anti-whiplash seats. Cars in the 1970s didn’t even have headrests!

10

Actually, what saves you in a modern car is the fact that it is designed to crumple and bend in a controlled manner. The fact that those old 70’s land boats don’t crumple actually works against you. You want all of the force of the accident to be disappated bending and breaking bits of the car, not bending and breaking bits of the driver.

Old 70’s land boats also don’t have anti-lock brakes, in bad weather the rear wheel drive is easier to lose control and fishtail if you don’t know what you are doing, and they tend to have big engines (especially bad for boys who like to go fast).

I personally love big old cars. I just don’t think they are a good idea for teenagers.

11

I’ve been in wrecks in both old and new cars and I always fared better in the older cars. The seatbelts didn’t need pretensioners…they were pretty much always locked. When a new smaller car hits an immobile object, the smaller car crushes. When an older car hits an immobile object, the object is no longer immobile, therefore less impact for the older big car.

Of course, God help whoever you run into.

12

I seriously doubt an older car is going to make a semi truck, bridge pylon, etc., “no longer immobile.”

13

Calliope I have never heard 5’2" listed as a minimum number for driving an airbag car. My answer to Janx was in response to the about 5 foot remark. About 5 foot means 4’10" to me. How close your ass is to the sidewalk, is not as important as how you sit in the car.
Now about your daughter, First go and read the link I posted beofre, it is full of good factual information. Next and this is important you must understand that a driver’s seat and a passenger’s seat are two completely different environments from a safety point of view. In the passenger’s seat the dash is a long way away, but the airbag is freakin huge. However on the driver’s side, the dash (steering wheel anyway) is within arm’s reach, but the airbag is much smaller. The driver’s airbag is always within arms reach. :eek: Really it isn’t as bad as it sounds.
When you teach your daughter to drive, she must be positioned correctly, she wants to be as far as possible from the steering wheel. This advice applies to anyone who drives an airbag car. The correct seating position is where when she extends her arm forward over the top of the steering wheel, the wheel will rest somewhere between her wrist and her palm. This should place the center of the steering wheel 8-10" away from her chest. Not trying to be crude here, but I do mean chest as in ribs, not her boobs. This will keep her safe in an accident. Using a tilt wheel with the wheel in the most vertical (down) position will also help. Also her moving the seat upward will also help. What you are trying to do here is to have the bag inflate without hitting her head. Her head should hit the bag when her body is thrown forward, not during the inflation portion of the cycle.
I hope this helps answer your questions. If you have more, feel free to ask here, or drop me an e mail.
jasonh300 This question is in GQ so I gotta ask, you got a cite for those claims of yours? :rolleyes: Accident statistics do not support your opinion.

14

Yes you should. You only have to disable the air bag on the pasenger seat side.

Unfortunately, I can only find cites in Swedish, but if you’re interested, I’ll try to translate them.

15

Fascinating site, Rick.

I can’t help but notice however, that in child deaths in the front seat, the vast majority were not wearing seat belts or were wearing them incorrectly. If you eliminate rear facing car seats, kids not wearing seatbelts and kids incorrectly wearing seat belts, there are only 8 kids in the study who have died from airbags. The article isn’t clear what years the study covers, but mentions “the late 1980s through November 1, 1997”, so that may be the range. Assuming that’s true, it’s not unreasonable to think less than one child per year was killed, and statistically, that’s nothing, especially since each of those children was (obviously) in a car crash.

It really makes me wonder why I shouldn’t put my kids in the front seat, as they aren’t infants and religiously wear their seatbelts.

16

Oh, I found some cites in English: one, two.

17

No, this is from personal experience. The statistics I can cite involve the use of seatbelts. Unfortunately, there are many different statistics for different age groups so it’s hard to find statistics to show a general percentage of people who used seatbelts by year.

What I was able to quickly find is that in 1981, the US rate of people using seatbelts was 11%. In 1991, the rate increased to 67%. In 2004, that had increased to 80%.

http://www.ksdot.org/burTrafficSaf/safblt/safbltusag.asp
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm

What I was looking for (and unable to find) was the percentage that used them back in the 60s and 70s. I’d be willing to bet it was under 5%…closer to 0% for the 60s because seatbelts were still an option until the late 60s. (The 3-point safety belt as we know it in modern cars was developed in 1963 by Volvo. In 1966, passage of the Highway Safety Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act authorized the federal government to set and regulate standards for motor vehicles and highways, a mechanism necessary for effective prevention…Vehicles were built with new safety features, including head rests, energy-absorbing steering wheels, shatter-resistant windshields, and safety belts.)

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm

The point I’m trying to make is that the big cars that were made in the 70s had all of the abovementioned safety features (3 point seatbelts, headrests, shatterproof windshields, energy absorbing sterring wheels) yet the most important feature, the seatbelt was not being used by most drivers.

Therefore, any accident statistics from that decade are worthless when you’re trying to compare usage of one of those old cars today, assuming that the people driving them today are using their seatbelt.

Maybe someone who knows how to do the math could pull up those accident statistics and apply a theoretical seatbelt to 80% of the deaths and figure out how many lives would’ve been saved if they had been wearing their seatbelts.

Finally, if you look at this site
http://www.usroads.com/journals/aruj/9803/ru980303.htm
Table 2, the traffic fatality rate in 1986 per 100,000 population was 19.19. In 1996, that had decreased to 15.80. That’s about a 19% decrease (I think). Now, if the usage of seatbelts increased so drastically from 1981 to 1991 (I know the years are different by a few, but this is the info I was able to find on short notice), it seems to me that this could be attributed to the fact the people now use seatbelts more than they used to.

Like I said, I’m not good at the math, so if someone can actually get some good ratios out of those numbers, it would be helpful.

18

jasonh300,
Your “big heavy landboat” theory can be judged more accurately with physics instead of statistics. Car crumple is good as long as it doesn’t impinge on the passenger cabin. This is what modern cars are designed to do. If I had offspring, I’d rather see them wrapped up in a modern Volvo than a Chevelle. The Chevelle is probably better than some little cheap econobox cars, but you are NOT going to be able to prove that cars made in the 70’s (in general) were safer than modern cars (in general) - if that’s what you’re trying to say.

19

Didn’t mean for this to be so controversial. When I said about 5 feet, I know how high is compared to me. Sounds like he might get away with it, if he were to have the seat all the way back. In the end looks like I would rather he wait another year or two – Thanks all for your input.

20

I did quite a bit of investigation on this topic last year when I bought a car that had a passenger airbag (I have kids, 14, 11 and 9)

I don’t have a cite, but I do remember that one of the largest recent studies (20,000 crashes or so, and I think I found the study on the NHTSA site) showed the following for 9 to 12 years (they may have qualified it with height/weight):

Best=Seatbelt AND airbag
2nd best=Back seat and seatbelt
Worse than those two=Airbag but no seatbelt
I think it really depends on the type of accident that happens to determine where you would prefer to have your kid. In a moderate to high speed head on, I would certainly want the airbag protecting my kids.