In a fascinating article Who want airbags? (PDF) from 2005, Mary Meyer and Tremika Finney argue that the statistics show the airbags cause more deaths than they save.
Broadly speaking, Meyer and Finney argue that the statistics tell the following two stories. First, in very serious accidents, airbags save many lives. However, when airbags go off accidentally or incorrectly – not in serious accidents – the act of the airbag exploding can be very dangerous, even fatal. They argue that government bodies have paid too much attention to the first statistic, to the detriment of the latter, even though this may happen more often. To quote:
Here is an analogy to help understand this: If you look at people who have cancer, radiation treatment will improve their probability of survival. However, radiation treatment is dangerous and can actually cause cancer. Making everyone in the country have airbags and measuring effectiveness only in the fatality group, is like making everyone have radiation treatment and looking only at the cancer group to check efficacy. Within the cancer group, radiation will be found to be effective, but there will be more deaths on the whole.
It’s well worth a read, and includes some discussion from a dissenter at the end.
Who want airbags? (PDF)
Mary C MEYER and Tremika FINNEY
Chance, 18:2, 3-16, 2005
