If I’m understanding page 5 of the document in the second link correctly, the 2021 percentages are relative to 2020, indicating that the increase in fatalities has continued to rise AGAIN.
Obviously increased speed and reduced law enforcement is a big factor. Other less safe driver behavior could be as well.
The multi vehicle fatalities have increased a lot more than the single vehicle. That suggests to me that a smaller number of speeding drivers are responsible for this. If 10% of drivers become more dangerous and cause 5% more single vehicle accidents, then that would correspond to 10% more multi vehicle accidents wouldn’t it?
I wonder if moving to more fuel efficient compact cars that have less room in front of the driver is also contributing to more fatalities. The depowered airbags (1998) and seat belt load limiters are definitely making things less safe in high speed crashes, but that’s been that way for 20 to 26 years now, so it wouldn’t be the cause for this.
I also wonder how the push toward either having a large truck or SUV or a small fuel efficient car is affecting things. In the past, most vehicles were closer to the same size and we didn’t have such extremes.
Surprise! The death rate went down from 1.34 to 1.33 per VMT, a 0.75% decrease.
As stated MULTIPLE time before, the data proves the opposite. Deaths per VMT has decreased steadily fro 1998 to 2019.
In this article…
“NHTSA recorded 238 deaths due to airbags between 1990 and 2002… They all occurred at very low speeds, with injuries that could not have been caused by anything else."
The pre-98 high powered airbags harmed 238 people they should have saved (and maybe more) because they were designed to protect un-belted passengers. Maybe my 2004 truck has two airbag igniters to fire one if belted and 2 if not…
With the deaths per VMT being about the same, that must mean that people are driving about 10% more in 2021 than they were in 2020 in order to have 10% more fatalities. But the bad habits learned from 2020 have remained.
That’s probably another study where they only considered one variable. Since vehicles without airbags don’t have seatbelt load limiters, the study really shows that you’re more likely to die in a car with seatbelt load limiters and a depowered airbag than a car without airbags. Pre 1998 vehicles which have airbags and don’t have load limiters were most likely not separated from the rest of the statistics when the study was done. Most of those pre 1998 airbag equipped vehicles are now off the road, so the contribute very little to the data to suppor that fewer deaths occur in vehicles with airbags. If this study had been done 15 years ago, the outcome would have been much different.
Yeah I didn’t realize the article was from 2005. I wonder what they would find now.
Where can I get the study? They’re saying that the injuries from airbags in low speed crashes, and possibly high speed crashes too, cause more deaths than they save in higher speed crashes, where all occupants are belted. At this the number of depowered airbags in use would be somewhere around half.
Any study like this that doesn’t separate depowered airbags from traditional ones is severely lacking.
A big issue I have with crash tests is they don’t do the crash test while braking, which is often the case in the real world. Braking causes passengers to be thrown forward.
I’m kind of surprised to see you promoting such an extreme idea!
Rough math… Average age of cars on the road is 11 years so 1/2 of cars from 1998 would be gone by 2009. Another 11 years would remove most of the rest of them by 2020 so only a very small percentage of those vehicles would still be on the road.
Try Google Scholar
What “extreme idea” are your referring to?
A comment about load limiters. Picture an egg in a 3 inch by 3 inch by 3 inch steel safe on a 5th story roof. The inside is styrofoam perfectly fitting the egg to the inside of the safe. The egg is well and truly protected by the safe, isn’t it? Push it off the roof. What happens to the egg when it hits the ground? It breaks.
Now put it in a 1 ft cubic safe surrounded by foam to limit the deceleration of the egg when it hits the ground to a level the egg can withstand. The egg survives. That is what load limiting seat belts do.
Engineering schools around the country have egg-drop competitions to teach this concept.
The study is from 2005. Airbags were just starting to be used in the majority of cars starting in the early 90s, and an airbag was only being required as a substitute for automatic seatbelts on the driver’s side. They didn’t become mandatory on both sides until 1998, which is the same year that depowered airbags were allowed.
I think this is the study: Abstract
It says data from 1997 to 2002 was used.
In the 1997 data all of the airbag equipped vehicles would be higher powered airbags. By 2002 cars less than 5 years old would be in the study, and many but not all had been redesigned with depowered airbags, and all these cars had airbags on both sides. So perhaps half of the cars in the 2002 data have the depowered airbags? If the average age of a vehicle was 10 years back then, remember that vehicles more than 10 years old back then mostly wouldn’t have had a airbag at all. Mixing that with the other years and the study would only be based on data from about 1/4 of vehicles having depowered airbags (and seat belt load limiteds to go along with most of them).
So it’s safe to say that roughly 3/4 of the vehicles in this data have high powered airbags.
The idea that airbags actually don’t increase your chances of surviving an accident for seat belt users goes against what nearly everyone thinks today.
The study is claiming that injuries from airbags deploying alone, both at low and high speeds, kill a fair amount of people. The number of lives saved is fairly small for belted occupants, and it doesn’t make up for the lives lost. Of course the study is primarily based high powered airbags.
This is an interesting study! If it’s true, the old high powered airbags were over all unnecessary for seat belt users. Especially for shorter people who would be more easily injured by them where they actually made things worse.
Try using rubber bands to hold the egg in the middle. If you drop it from too high up, the egg will hid a side of the safe and break!
I did not write anything of the sort nor do I beleive this. My comment was directed to the high powered airbags that did kill some occupants when they otherwise should have survived. The government requirement followed by the carmakers was directly responsible for those deaths. When allowed, the carmakers installed a better airbag solution.
My short wife was put in danger by these types of high powered airbags because she was positioned very close to the wheel. And she always wears her belts.
If the styrofoam is the same density, then the egg will probably brake in both cases. If you use a different density styrofoam, then the test is invalid because you changed two variables.
The reason for probably is that if you use a light density styrofoam for both tests, the foam in the three inch box might completely collapse before taking all the energy out of the egg causing the egg to encounter much higher forces at the end of its travel.
The solution is to use soft open cell foam, not styrofoam to allow some motion of the egg that reduces the total deceleration on the egg. BTW, the word is break, not brake…
And this isn’t a “test” of the foam, it is 2 design changes that protect the egg rather than breaking it. The 2 variables were changed on purpose to alter the design. The only invalidity is the broken egg. An intact egg is the design requirement.
I don’t know why I had styrofoam on my mind, I thought that you had used the term but I see that you didn’t.
But, unless you are trained in multivariate analysis such as the Taguchi method, most of us change only one variable at a time. It might be possible for an egg to survive the 5 story fall in the 3" box with the correct density of foam. With the wrong density of foam, too soft, it might break even in the 12" box.
BTW, a fresh raw egg can be dropped from a 5 story building without any padding or protection at all and still not break. I know how to do that.
Funny story, a company I worked for sent me to a class on Taguchi analysis to improve the performance of a polishing machine we had. By the time I finished the training and set up an array for analysis, they got rid of the machine as no matter what, it took longer and people polishing by hand.
Technically, I did only change on variable… the eggs travel distance upon impact. I’ll explain…
In the first instance the egg travels, about 1 mm and breaks. That is all the stiff styrofoam and the small box size can provide. Clearly the decel rate is too high for the egg.
I want to reduce the decel rate so I increase the distance the egg can travel when it hits the ground. So in the second case, the egg must slow over a longer distance to reduce the decel rate. Now I need to determine the stiffness of the foam and the size of the box that gives me the travel distance I want to try. I am changing stiffness and box size but the key parameter is decel rate and way to reduce it is to increase travel.
I’ve had classes in Robust Engineering which is a Taguchi-based technique.