April 1993, a 6 year-old child who was sitting unrestrained in the front passenger seat of a 1993-model car was killed when the passenger-side airbag deployed during a collision with a stationary vehicle. The child died from a brain injury caused by blunt-force trauma (Bourke). This is one example of the real life consequences of airbags, when people disregard the power of airbags. The first great step forward in preventing fatal and serious injuries with airbags is for car occupants to always wear a seat belt (Bourke). With seatbelts and airbags the chance of no injury is 80 percent. Passenger airbags have been standard in all new cars since 1996, these devices have been credited with saving more than 4750 people, but also it has been implicated in the deaths of 146 people including 84 children. Now, here is the issue to be discussed. Children are the future, but how are they going to get there by killer airbags? For a young child sitting in the front seat 80 pounds or less, with a passenger side airbag is almost a death wish. Statistics show that most children under 80 pounds have too small of a physical structure to sit in the passenger seat. All because of these occurrences the next few pages will show and explain the consequences of children in the wrong seat of the car. .
The first and most common sense way of keeping a child safe in a car is to teach the adult/parent more about child safety in a car. To begin, cars are not designed with children in mind. This will be obvious to any parent obliged to purchase the procession of products necessary for the safe transportation of children. Although children make up nearly 20 percent of the population, the car industry has yet to design and build cars that afford the same degree of crash protection for children as for adult's equipment (Roberts).
The issue is not trivial. Airbags are dangerous to children. For a little information, airbags are nitrogen filled killers, concealed within the dashboard and steering wheel that inflate in a crash to prevent a potentially fatal injury to an occupant's head and chest.
