Motorists driving cars with air-bags should be warned they have "a bomb in their car", according to one of the speakers at the 17th Congress of the International Academy of Legal Medicine in Dublin. Dr William Smock, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Louisville in the US, said that the dangers were known to the car industry, which conducted experiments involving pigs. The first six pigs tested all died.
"The industry has known about this for 25 years," he said. "There have been internal memos in Ford saying that no one under five feet should be in the passenger seat with an airbag, but there was a decision not to release this in case it might scare people."
"People don't know they have a bomb in their car. It's a controlled explosion using a chemical explosive." Warnings about taking precautions with air-bags are now posted in cars in the US, he said, but he remarked that a new car he rented in Dublin had no such warning.
Dr Smock has been conducting research on air-bags for six years. He told the Congress that 79 people in the US had been killed by air-bags in collisions at speeds of 15 m.p.h. and less. Forty-four of them were children, including two who were decapitated. A large number of people suffered serious injury.
However, this must be set against the fact that 1,900 lives were saved by air-bags in high speed collisions, he said. "In a frontal collision someone of five feet eight inches who is restrained will be saved by an air-bag." Children and drivers of less-than-average height were most at risk in low-speed accidents.
Dr Smock said he was not advocating a ban on air-bags, which are now mandatory in all cars manufactured in the US. However, he was urging a number of preventative measures, including a manual cut-off switch and increasing the speed at which the bags are deployed to 20 m.p.h. or more.