I have watched an untold number of airbag tests in my lifetime and in all of them the test dummies are sitting up straight with their faces forward and their arms to the sides of the body, but in real life aren’t people inclined to turn their heads and/or put their arms up to (often futilely) avoid damage? Instead of the airbag hitting someone face-forward, wouldn’t this cause the airbag to either twist the head to the side even faster or cause the arms to slam into the face at a high rate of speed?
What am I missing here?
Some collisions happen too fast for a human being to have time to lift their arms or otherwise block what’s coming.
Also, it’s hard to install animatronics into crash test dummies. At least not mechanism that will work for more than just the first impact.
But yes, it’s a problem that the results from airbags may be, shall we say, less than optimal or satisfactory when occupants of a vehicle are “out of position”. Yet none of us sit rigidly in the seats at all times.
Seatbelts are designed to keep you in your seat so the airbag has a chance of protecting you in a crash, however, there is no guarantee you’ll be perfectly aligned with the airbag when it actually deploys, and that’s okay. It’s still a lot better than not having an airbag.
I would still like to see an airbag test or two where the crash test dummies have their arms up and a few inches from the face to see what happens.
It’s not like there aren’t tens of thousands of real-world examples every year…
If by Human, you mean MALE then maybe yes.
Also :
Cite : Dummies Used In Motor Vehicle Crash Tests Favor Men And Put Women At Risk, New Report Says
I think I read somewhere that the Europeans test with dummies representative of women but cannot find a cite.
Never mind the body positions - it took testers till 2003 to figure out that maybe they should also include the female half of the population. And they still probably haven’t got it right.
ETA: You know what they also don’t got? Ninja test dummies
I could have sworn the Mythbusters did a test where they put a dummy’s hand(s) in the way of an airbag. Searching only shows results of a not-Adam & Jamie revival show testing feet on the dash. Yeah, don’t do that.
For years we have all been told that the way to hold a steering wheel is at ‘ten and two’. Since airbags, the advice is ‘nine and three’. Placing your hands on the wheel at the nine and three position is far safer as you do not obstruct the driver’s airbag in the event of a collision.
As someone who tends to fold one leg under me on long car rides - if not outright sitting Indian style with both legs folded on the seat - I assume that a bad collision with the front airbags deploying would do wonderful things for my knees and would feel really good.
"Episode 87 – "Myth Revolution
Myth Statement
Drivers who hold the steering wheel in the 10–2 position can have their thumbs ripped off by a deploying airbag. (From Lockpick of Death)
**Status **
Busted
Notes
Drivers who hold the steering wheel in the 10–2 position can have their thumbs ripped off by a deploying airbag. (From Lockpick of Death) Busted The Build Team obtained steering wheels with working airbags and created a pair of ballistics gel hands that would simulate a driver holding the steering wheel at the 10–2 position. When the airbag deployed, it knocked the arms off the steering wheel, but did not cause any visible damage to the thumbs. Then, based on a report of an actual thumb injury, the Build Team tested the myth with the driver’s hands positioned in a fashion similar to the Vulcan salute with the thumbs directly over the airbag. The deploying airbag caused serious damage to the thumbs, including breaks in the simulated bones. However, because the myth specified the commonly used 10–2 position, the myth was busted."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2007_season)#Episode_87_%E2%80%93_%22Myth_Revolution%22
What’s being missed is that the number of number of lives saved outweighs the need to extensively test and modify airbags for situations like having a turned head or hands in front of the face.
On the other hand, the deaths of small children in the front seats prompted the implementation of manual shut off switches for front passenger airbags. My emphasis:
"I. Overview and Summary
While air bags are providing significant overall safety benefits, NHTSA is very concerned that current designs have adverse effects in some situations. Of particular concern, NHTSA has identified 21 relatively low speed crashes in which the deployment of the passenger-side air bag resulted in fatal injuries to a child. NHTSA believes that these children would not have died if there had been no air bag.
All of these deaths occurred under circumstances in which the child’s upper body was very near the air bag when it deployed. The children sustained fatal head or neck injuries, as a result of the deploying air bag. Six of these deaths involved infants in rear-facing child seats, where the infant’s head was located very near the instrument panel and the air bag. The 15 other children appear to have been unbelted or improperly belted (e.g., wearing only the lap belt with the shoulder belt behind them) at the time of the crash. During pre-impact braking, these children slid or leaned forward so that they were too close to the instrument panel and air bag at the time of deployment.
The most direct solution to the problem of child fatalities from air bags is for children to be properly belted and placed in the back seat. This necessitates increasing the percentage of children who are properly restrained by child safety seats and improving the current 67 percent rate of seat belt usage by a combination of methods, including the encouragement of State primary seat belt laws.*The most direct technical solution to the problem of child fatalities from air bags is the development and installation of smart passenger-side air bags that automatically protect children from the adverse effects that can occur from close proximity to a deploying bag. However, until these smart air bags can be incorporated in production vehicles, behavioral changes based on improved information and communication of potential hazards and simpler, manually operated technology appear to be the best means of addressing child fatalities from air bags.
*
To partially implement these tentative conclusions, NHTSA is proposing the following for passenger cars and light trucks whose passenger-side air bag lacks smart capability: (1) To require new, enhanced warning labels; and (2) to permit manual cutoff switches for the passenger-side air bags (to accommodate parents who need to place rear-facing child seats in the front seat). By limiting the labeling requirement to vehicles without smart air bags, NHTSA hopes to encourage the introduction of those air bags as soon as possible. For purposes of this notice, NHTSA considers smart passenger-side air bags to include ones designed so that they automatically avoid injuring the two groups of children shown by experience to be at special risk from air bags: infants in rear-facing child seats, and children who are out-of-position (because they are unbelted or improperly belted) when the air bag deploys.
The agency is also proposing to require vehicles and rear-facing child seats to bear new, enhanced warning labels. The proposed labels would warn that unbelted children and children in those child seats may be seriously injured or killed by the passenger-side air bag."
Source: https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/whatsup/fedreg/fedregV61N152.html
I wonder if they have ever done an airbag test of a dummy with glasses and a lit cigarette hanging out of its mouth.
My kids are 21 and 23 and when they took driver’s ed the suggestion was 8 and 4, for the same reason. I think it’s a terrible idea to modify your driving technique to something suboptimal for 100% of your driving to mitigate the risk of an event that has a very small chance of occurring. I have always used 9 and 3 just because I think that’s most effective for driving.
Wish I could remember if this news report was local or national news; maybe then my Googlage wouldn’t have come up snake eyes. But I swear, this was in a MSM report that I saw online sometime in the past two years.
Police officer, engaging in pursuit, had his left hand on the wheel at 12 o’clock while his right hand was busy with the radio handset … and while he missed a curve and hit a tree. When the airbag deployed he wound up punching out two or three of his own front teeth with the back of his hand.
Yeah, there’s probably too many personal variations in the way people sit to optimize this in any way. When I’m a front seat passenger, I’ll sometimes use the shoulder strap part of the belt in ways it wasn’t intended - if I want to rest my head, I’ll do this thing where I loop the belt around my right wrist, scooch around somewhat sideways in the seat and lean my head against the strap. I find it more comfortable than leaning back against the headrest. Lord only knows what that does to me in a crash.
in a way they do, as federal/NHTSA standards require airbag systems to be able to protect unbelted occupants. EU and countries who follow EU regulations don’t.
A friend of mine is a paramedic. One of the most gruesome injuries he came across was a woman smoking a cigarette when she rear ended someone. The airbag slammed the hand holding the cigarette into her face, the lit cigarette was slammed into her open eye. He had to pull the cigarette butt out of her eye before applying a bandage.
As a result of that report, I’m not allowed to have kids under 7 in the front seat.
That reference is dated 1996, which suggests that it was associated with the low-speed-crash air bags used in the USA to protect people not wearing seat belts.
Which then leads me to wonder how relevant it actually was to Aus, where kids in the front seat (like other people) would certainly be wearing seat belts, and the air bags would only have been triggered by high speed crashes anyway.
I think it’s a poor idea to use a driving position that was optimal for driving an old car with manual steering, in my modern car with power steering. I’ve tried to use 9 & 3 like I used to do in the truck, but it just doesn’t work: the steering is far to sensitive, the steering geometry far too different, and the hand action not at all the same.
Regarding air bags and kids, I know that some modern cars have weight sensors in the seats, and use a weight range as part of the calculation to determine whether or not to deploy a bag. If it’s low, it will assume a child is sitting in the seat and may not deploy an airbag, depending on the severity of the collision.
I got my driver’s license in 1989 and was taught to keep the hands “between 8 and 10, between 2 and 4; in short drives or city traffic it’s not so important as you’ll keep moving them to do other stuff but on long drives remember to change positions occasionally.” For some reason a lot of the safety information coming out of the US talks as if human beings were mannequins: sitting position all right-angles, driving positions absolutely fixed… people will never do exactly that, but often designs are done assuming a Standard Human in a Fixed Position, without inserting any kind of ranges into the equations.
I don’t know about a crash, but in Spain it could cost your driver several points off his license and each of you a fine (and if you had a license, several points off yours too).