Re: How Long?
That still means that most of my cars will have questionable airbags
One could argue that it's not worth worrying about, when you consider the joint probability that:
- you will be involved in an accident severe enough to cause serious injury, and
- this accident is of a type where your airbag could have alleviated such injury even though you were wearing a properly-fastened seatbelt,1 and
- this accident was not so serious that the airbag wouldn't make a damn bit of difference anyway, and
- the airbag did in fact fail to deploy due to age
My guess is that probability is pretty damn low.
In Freakonomics,2 Levitt and Dubner claim that pretty much all of the decline in infant mortality from auto accidents in the US came from putting children in the back seat and belting them in, and "proper use" of a child seat has negligible additional benefit, statistically.3 I suspect the same applies to some degree with airbags: that there isn't that much statistical benefit once you correct for other behavior by the driver and passengers, particularly seatbelt use and reasonably competent driving.
I've read stories that claim e.g. a 26% benefit in mortality from airbags - ie that deaths from crashes for seatbelt-wearing drivers are reduced that much by airbags. But I'm dubious. And, of course, a reduction from a 1% probability to 0.74% is "a 26% reduction"; without actual figures there's no way to know if that's significant.
1I'm going to assume this is true for the sake of argument
2I know, I know. Taken with a healthy grain of salt.
3Of course that hasn't stopped the American Academy of Pediatrics from continuing to issue ever-more-stringent recommendations for child-seat use. (I don't understand how they can be so rigorous in their use of EBM to - correctly - justify childhood vaccination, while failing to do so in cooking up these car-seat rules.) Or one particularly stupid legislator here in Michigan from trying to mandate them by law.