wrote in message
oups.com...

Ed Huntress wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
One bit of the information is that smart air bags are expected to
cost
$173 per car. That must come to 1.x billion dollars per year.
What I
don't have is the number of deaths saved by air bags when the
person
was wearing a seat belt. I am not even sure there is anyway one
can
find out if an air bag saved the life of a person who was wearing a
seat belt.

Have you tried? Or are you "not even sure" because it didn't hit you
over
the head on Google?

--
Ed Huntress
I thought about how one would know if the seat belt alone would have
saved the life as opposed to knowing that both a seat belt and air bag
were needed to save the life. I can't see how I would make that
determination if I were filling out a report on the accident. And
figured that it was unlikely there was a good way to make this
determination. Therefore I reasoned that Any statistics that I found
would be very suspect. So I did not even try google.

If you know of a good way to determine if a person wearing a seat belt
lived because of an air bag and would have died with the seat belt
alone, please let me know.

There are enough double-pair comparison studies, done both with accident
statistics and with instrumented dummies, to convince anyone with a
reasonable understanding of the science behind it. You can find them via
Google.

FWIW, this ****ed me off no end, because I wanted to believe that seat belts
and shoulder harnesses were just as good. I used to argue vehemently against
airbags. But the data was overwhelming, so I stopped.

--
Ed Huntress