First as federal traffic-safety czarina for Jimmy Carter, and today as president of the Naderite outfit Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook has spent an entire career accusing automakers of scrimping on safety because it costs money — in other words, of profiting from death and injury. And she is accustomed to playing the hero, particularly on the question of airbags. As recently as last year, Claybrook was still bemoaning to a reporter for the Washington Monthly Detroit’s failure to “see the human cost of not implementing the airbag.”
And what about Detroit’s warnings — which have turned out to be spectacularly prescient — that airbags would put children and small adults at risk of serious head injuries or even death? Ordinary people were not supposed to give them credence, since in the Naderite worldview warnings from car companies can only be self-serving nonsense. “Grasping at straws,” the Monthly article reported, “the car companies . . . even circulated an old film showing pigs being gravely injured by inflating airbags.”
That would be film from a 1974 study commissioned by Volvo, “Possible Effects of Airbag Inflation on a Standing Child.” Anesthetized baby pigs were placed four to six inches from a dashboard airbag in simulated minor collisions. Twelve percent of the pigs survived without injury. More than half were badly hurt. A third of them died.
And now, of course, Volvo’s pig film (like earlier research by General Motors) has been vindicated. As front pages all over the country have reported, passengercar airbags are killing twice as many children as they save each year. By 2000, after they become standard on all new vehicles manufactured in the United States, airbags are projected to kill children at a rate of one each week.
An occasion for humility and contrition from Joan Claybrook, you would expect. The facts, you might say, have blown up in her face and pinned her to her seat. Her enemies weren’t lying, after all. Airbags are dangerous. And it turns out she probably knew it all along. So what does she do?
She blames Detroit. “Despite the knowledge of the performance of the air bags they designed, promoted and are selling to the public,” Claybrook wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, “the auto companies until now have not explicitly warned occupants with an obvious and unequivocal label on the dashboard.”
Those pigs died in vain. Joan Claybrook still doesn’t get it.
