Air bag progress report 6.

What has been the cost, in money, to the American consumer of the government's interference in auto design and auto safety? Clearly, the cost in lives and severe injuries is more serious, but the cost in money has not been negligable either. Since the government did not require the installation of air bags in all cars until l998 and in all light trucks until l999, we will consider what the cost has been since l998.

First, we need to determine the cost per vehicle and, secondly, the number of vehicles sold. Wikepedia (1) estimates that air bags add $500 to the cost of a new car. That seems like a reasonable estimate. SafetyAirBags (2) estimates the replacement cost as charged by a dealer at $1,400 per car. Autopedia (3) gives an estimate of $1,200 to $1,500. NHTSA (4) gives a figure of $250 per car for side curtain air bags alone. Yahoo answers (5) estimates $500 to $1,500, not counting the module (the control unit used in so-called "smart airbags".) Clearly, the cost to the manufacturer would be less than the replacement cost to the consumer, since the manufacturer would buy the air bags wholesale and install them during the assembly process, which is cheaper than replacing them. Those costs would be passed on to the consumer.

In an historical footnote, when air bags were first proposed during the late l970's, when Miss Joan Claybrook was NHTSA administrator and was particularly aggressive in trying to get these devices forced on the public, the General Services Administration (GSA), which is the buying agency for the federal government, issued an order that in the future all cars purchased by the federal government would have to be equipped with air bags. The Ford Motor Company then informed GSA that that would add $700 to the price of each car (those were l970s dollars, worth twice as much as dollars today). GSA then decided that maybe they shouldn't require new government cars to be equipped with air bags after all, and rescinded the order.

Interestingly enough, while practically every European country has a primary seatbelt law, and European governments are, if anything, even more Orwellian than American governments, for some reason European governments never required cars in Europe to be equipped with air bags.

Seatbelts run around $33 per seat retail (6), but that does not include the so-called seatbelt pretensers which have been standard on most cars for some years. So $100 per car would be a reasonable estimate. The many other requirements of the FMVSS would add additional costs to each vehicle, but these are difficult to quantify, so we will confine ourselves here to seatbelts and air bags.

Next, we need to determine how many cars have been sold in the United States since l998. We found this information on a web site from RITA, the Research and Innovative Technology Administration of the Department of Transportation (7). We'll bet you didn't know the U.S.Government had an "Innovative Technology Administration". It might be interesting sometime to find out what their budget is and what "innovative technologies" they have developed so far, but we will have to leave that for another time. The following table gives the number of car and light truck sales in the United States since l998, in millions:

Adding the numbers, we find that 89.37 million cars have been sold in the United States since l998; that is for the years l999 through 2009, inclusive, since the air bag requirement did not go into effect until September 1, 1998. The number of light trucks sold in the United States since 1998 works out to 81.8 million; that is, for the years 1999 to 2009, inclusive. Thus, the total number of vehicles sold during this period works out to 171.17 million. Multiplying that number by $500 for the cost of air bags alone works out to $85.585 billion dollars. Adding the cost of seatbelts at $100 per car, we come out with a total cost of $102.702 billion dollars just for air bags and seatbelts in the last ten years alone.

References:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag
(2) http://www.safetyairbags.com
(3) http://www.autopedia.com/html/HVAA1.html
(4) http://www.nhtsa.gov 
(5) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100321112553AAB15C8
(6) http://www.seatbeltsplus.com
(7) http://www.bts.gov/publications/pocket_guide_to_transportation/2010/html/figure_05_10_table.html