An Occupant Protection History Lesson

The following information is summarized from an article titled "WRONG TURN: How the fight to make America's highways safer went off course" prepared by Malcolm Gladwell and published in "The New Yorker" June 11, 2001.

To answer the question "how do accidents happen?" Mr. Gladwell states an average driver makes 400 observations, 40 decisions and 1 mistake for every 2 miles driven. He contends that every 500 miles, 1 of those mistakes leads to a near collision; and every 61,000 miles, 1 of those mistakes leads to a crash. These facts led Mr. Gladwell to think mistakes are common and accidents inevitable due to human error.

Another cause of crashes is what Arien Mack calls "inattentional blindness." Most of us believe we see everything that is clearly in sight. Mack, a psychologist at the New School in New York conducted experiments to test what is actually observed. She briefly flashed the shape of a cross on a computer screen and asked observers to determine which arm was longer. After several flashes she added another object, like a word or small colored square, to the cross. A "significant portion" of her observers did not "see" the added object. Although directly in sight and clearly visible, it was not observed because attention was focused on the cross.

More dramatic experiments on the same idea have been done by Daniel Simons, professor of psychology at Harvard, and a colleague, Christopher Chabris. They videotaped two teams of basketball players, one in white shirts and the other in black. The players were in constant motion, passing two basketballs back and forth. In this case, observers were instructed to count the number of passes completed by the white team. After about 45 seconds, a woman in a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the group, stood in front of the camera, beat her chest vigorously, and walked away. Simon reported that 50% of the people missed the gorilla. They not only missed the gorilla, they didn't see anyone walk across the screen. They claimed to only see the bas-ketball players and basketballs. When observers were asked if they noticed the gorilla they replied, "The what?" With this in mind, it is easier to understand that someone driving down a familiar roadway could "miss" seeing an approaching hazard because a) it is not usually there, and/or b) their focus is on something else.

Until 1958 it was commonly believed that safety efforts needed to focus on reducing accidents by educating and training drivers, and getting them to drive slower. One man, William Haddon, did not find this theory logical and determined to focus on reducing injuries caused by accidents. Haddon did not believe safety measures should depend on changing the behavior of drivers. He thought drivers were "unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error" and promoted passive safety measures.

Haddon concepts were documented in Epidemic on the Highways, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1959. Ralph Nader also supported Haddon's theories in his best seller Unsafe at Any Speed, written in 1965. The following year Haddon and his supporters argued in Washington for legislation requiring safety measures such as collapsing steering columns, padded instrument panels, recessed knobs, reinforced doors and roofs, head rests, and safety glass in windshields. The bill passed in both the House and Senate and provided for the formation of a regulatory agency that eventually became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with William Haddon as commissioner. At a Senate hearing an accident was described where the driver who was driving a car with a collapsible steering column left the scene uninjured. The other driver, without a collapsible steering column, was killed. This description solidified belief in the new and astonishing concept of "a crash without an injury."

Even though the auto design improvements implemented by Haddon changed how cars were built, brought national awareness to the issue of traffic safety, and saved lives, they did not make highways in the United States the safest in the world. Sadly, auto-fatality rates in the United States went from the lowest in the world (before Haddon's theories were implemented) to eleventh place. Many differences, including drunk driving trends, set the United States apart from countries such as Canada and Australia.

Leonard Evans, a researcher for General Motors and world expert on traffic safety, compared traffic safety efforts to public health efforts during a typhoid epidemic. Mr. Evans is quoted as saying, "Either you can persuade people to boil their own water or you can put chlorine in the water. . . . (the) passive solution is obviously preferred . . . there is no way you can persuade everyone to act in a prudent way. But starting from that philosophical principle and then ignoring reality is a recipe for disaster. And that's what happened. Why? Because there isn't any chlorine for traffic crashes."

Another passive safety device was invented in the early fifties by John Hetrick. After running his car into a ditch, Mr. Hetrick became convinced it would be much safer for drivers and passengers to be protected by a cu-shion of air. One barrier was how to provide that protective cushion of air quickly enough during the progression of a crash to be of benefit. Mr. Hetrick recalled an incident he had witnessed while working in a torpedo-maintenance shop during his time in the Navy. A torpedo covered in canvas released its charge of compressed air and the canvas "shot up into the air, quicker than you could blink an eye." The air bag, originally called the People Saver, was developed. Engineers from Eaton, Yale & Towne, an auto-parts manufacturer based in Cleveland, showed a prototype of the People Saver to Haddon in 1968. He loved it. Inflating the first air bags involved "detonating what was essentially a small bomb inside a car," and caused some concerns. Since then air bags have been substantially depowered, following "numerous injuries to children and small adults."

In 1968, Haddon and his supporters believed a crash was actually two separate collisions. First, the initial contact between two vehicles; and second, the contact of the occupants with the inside of their vehicle. They believed that in order to survive the impact of a crash, a safety system was needed to carefully and gradually decelerate passengers. Even though seat belts were a logical choice, Haddon did not trust people to cooperate in the use of such a safety measure and seat belt use was only about 12%. Using air bags required no user decision and was considered a "technological vaccine."

Ralph Nader, a Haddon supporter, believed seat belts should have been introduced in the 1920s and would have been obsolete by the early 1950s. He believed seat belts were "only the first step toward a more rational passenger restraint system." He believed the ideal system would always be available and be used only when needed, not something requiring action by occupants.

Today's shoulder belts usually have about two inches of slack. In a crash the car decelerates on impact, but passengers continue moving forward. Any slack in a seat belt is gone and the restraint is "loaded" within 30 milliseconds of a crash. At this point a safety belt will stretch, and may continue stretching up to six inches. As shoulder belts tighten, they dig into and compress the occupant's chest to two inches. At the moment of maximum forward movement, a shoulder belt looks like a rubber band around a balloon. During these same first milliseconds, an air bag would activate and raise to meet the front seat occupant at more than 100 miles per hour--enveloping the face, neck and upper chest 40 to 50 milliseconds after impact and deflating a fraction of a second later. Total time from impact to deflation of air bag? 100 milliseconds.

You can probably survive a crash with safety belts and without an air bag. You would probably hit the steering wheel and/or windshield and may break your nose, cut your face or head, or experience a mild concussion. What would happen with only an air bag and no safety belt is not as certain. Air bags work best in a head-on impact where a passenger pitches forward directly into the expanding bag. Without safety belts, if the impact is at an angle or from the side, a passenger may be thrown to the side and receive little or no benefit from an expanding air bag.

Presently automobiles are built with steel rails connect-ing the passenger compart-ment to the front bumper. Convolutions, accordion-like folds, are designed into each rail to slowly and evenly ab-sorb the impact of a head-on collision. The space between a front-seat passenger and the front bumper is usually over 30 inches; but less than 5 inches generally separate an occupant from the door.

In a crash described in the article, a driver not wearing his seat belt was hit from the side. If belted, the driver would have moved with his vehicle away from the impact. Since he was not belted, his vehicle moved but he did not. The driver's door slammed into his ribs and spleen within 15 milliseconds of impact and he died of abdominal injuries. The air bag would not have saved this driver, since he was moving sidewise toward to door and not forward into the air bag.

Statistics show that wearing safety belts cuts the chances of a crash fatality by 43% and adding air bag protection cuts the risk by 47%. Using an air bag alone reduces the risk of a crash fatality by only 13%. These statistics demonstrate that safety belts, not air bags, provide the safest outcome.

Late-model Ford minivans have a pretensioner, a tiny explosive device that takes the slack out of a belt just after the moment of impact. Ford engineer Stephen Kozak states the pretensioner prevents the "clothesline effect" caused by continued forward movement of the passenger before the safety belt locks and becomes "loaded," decelerating the body more gradually. Safety belts are also now being designed to cut down on chest compression. The presently occurring two-inch compression can cause fractures in people with older, less resilient bones and cartilage. Newer safety belts provide several extra inches of to be released on impact to reduce pressure on the chest.

The next step in safety belts appears to be a 4-point belt with shoulder belts that lay across the chest like suspenders and attach to a lap belt. At auto shows this spring Ford demonstrated a 4-point prototype and estimates it may cut fatality risk by another 10%, making safety belts about five times more effective than air bags alone.

In the early 1970s, Victoria, Australia passed the world's first mandatory seat belt legislation. Combined with aggressive public education, rates of seatbelt use jumped from 20% to 80%. While Canada, New Zealand, Germany, France and other countries also passed mandatory seatbelt laws, Haddon advocated air bags. He believed in passive restraints, but not consumers. Nader agreed, listing various administrative questions and stating that the US has a "libertarian streak . . . Europe doesn't have." As Haddon's special assistant at NHTSA., Joan Claybrook, also believed more strongly in ve-hicle regulation, stating that it's easier to get 20 auto companies to change than to get "200 million Americans" to change.

In 1984 Claybrook still insisted it was a "fool's errand" to encourage seatbelt use, stating that it was unlikely mandatory seat belt usage laws would be enacted or accepted by large numbers of the public and that there was "massive public resistance to adult safety belt usage." Haddon wrote that the best solution would be automatic protection (such as air bags) as baseline protection, "with seat belts as a supplement for those who will use them." That same year a coalition of medical groups passed the country's first mandatory seat belt law in New York. By also passing mandatory seat-belt laws, other states proved Americans did not have a "cultural aversion" to seat belts. B.J. Campbell, formerly a safety researcher at the University of North Carolina, stated that it is "a habit, and either you're in the habit . . . or you're not."

Current safety-belt usage rates are over 70% in the US.