Life: It sure ain't boring.
I didn't go to school today. There's a very good reason.
I got up, ate, dressed, and chipped the ice off my car before starting out. I even managed to drive a few blocks.
Then a big, bright red minivan appeared in the intersection ahead of me. I slammed on the brakes but the right side of that van just kept getting bigger and bigger and...
WHAM!
All I could see was white. What the heck happened?! It took me a few moments to realize that the air bag went off. Mainly I realized that because the bag had deflated enough for me to see the windshield.
What was left of it, anyway. Though I didn't take that in yet. At that moment my attention was taken by a middle aged man opening the driver side door of my car and asking me if I was all right. I said yes and he proceeded to try to dial 911 from his cell phone.
So I took that moment to assess the situation. I was in one piece. My back pack in the seat next to me seemed to have barely moved. The car, however, had turned nearly 90 degrees to the right along with the minivan, which had a very large but mostly cosmetic dent in the rear passenger side door.
I also noticed that the driver side airbag had ripped the central part the steering wheel to shreds, there was the broken end of a knob from the steering column on the dashboard, also some sort of washer/nut thing the origin of which I couldn't even guess, and there was some sort of smoke that was making me cough. That cough probably didn't make my response to the other driver terribly convincing.
Then I noticed the little green shards of glass on the dashboard. Why does broken glass look turquoise? Anyway, I looked over and saw why. The panel covering the passenger side airbag and popped up (at roughly 100 mph, according to one of the cops who eventually arrived) and smashed up a good half of the windshield.
It was about then that the gravity of the situation sunk in and I started crying. Bawling, actually. Between the 911 operator, the guy from the corner house who called 911, the other driver, the lady who stopped to help, and the two cops I kind of lost track of how many times I had to tell people that I was physically unhurt.
Now here's the irony of this situation. The airbags, installed as a mandatory safety measure, actually caused me and the car more harm than the crash alone. A *safety* device caused harm. Now, the harm to me was mostly psychological. Being temporarily blinded at the moment of impact did *not* help my frame of mind. That smoke, which turned out to be something akin to talcum powder, and the cough it produced didn't help either. The big kicker was the gaping hole in the windshield. Do you have any idea how much new windshields cost?? Low end is around $150.
The harm to the car, obviously, was very physical. There was much more airbag related visual damage than actual impact damage that I could see. The front bumper of my car was cracked up and there was what looked like a black felt strap sticking out, but other than that it was fine. Strictly cosmetic. The engine hadn't even skipped a beat. The windshield, all that broken glass inside and outside of the car, and that whatever it was on the dashboard however...
And the stupid thing didn't even prevent me from hitting the steering wheel! I didn't even come in contact with the airbag at all! I was wearing my seat belt.
I would love to simply tell the body shop to forget about replacing the airbags. Just vacuum up the glass, replace the windshield, and check the headlight alignment. But that would be illegal. Air bags are a necessary part of cars, whether it makes sense or not, that's the law.
You know what? I think air bags are a really stupid idea. That's not to say they haven't come a long way from the early days when they could blow out eardrums and possibly kill someone shorter than, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here's a thought, if you're really worried about people bumping into the steering wheel during an accident, why don't you make the steering column retract on impact? Or use some sort of smart material that will turn rubbery on impact? Or even both. Use the smart material for the part of the wheel you hold and retract the column.
I think it's doable. I mean, there's already a device out there that can stop a circular table saw so fast that it won't even cut your hand a tiny bit. (There are sensors of the blade that detect skin or something like that. It read a hot dog as a human finger so I don't know what exactly it's measuring.) Granted, the mechanisms are shot afterward and have to be replaced, but this is something that stops and retracts a full speed circular saw in a fraction of a second. I think something can be arranged for a car's steering wheel that won't require full replacement on use.
I got up, ate, dressed, and chipped the ice off my car before starting out. I even managed to drive a few blocks.
Then a big, bright red minivan appeared in the intersection ahead of me. I slammed on the brakes but the right side of that van just kept getting bigger and bigger and...
WHAM!
All I could see was white. What the heck happened?! It took me a few moments to realize that the air bag went off. Mainly I realized that because the bag had deflated enough for me to see the windshield.
What was left of it, anyway. Though I didn't take that in yet. At that moment my attention was taken by a middle aged man opening the driver side door of my car and asking me if I was all right. I said yes and he proceeded to try to dial 911 from his cell phone.
So I took that moment to assess the situation. I was in one piece. My back pack in the seat next to me seemed to have barely moved. The car, however, had turned nearly 90 degrees to the right along with the minivan, which had a very large but mostly cosmetic dent in the rear passenger side door.
I also noticed that the driver side airbag had ripped the central part the steering wheel to shreds, there was the broken end of a knob from the steering column on the dashboard, also some sort of washer/nut thing the origin of which I couldn't even guess, and there was some sort of smoke that was making me cough. That cough probably didn't make my response to the other driver terribly convincing.
Then I noticed the little green shards of glass on the dashboard. Why does broken glass look turquoise? Anyway, I looked over and saw why. The panel covering the passenger side airbag and popped up (at roughly 100 mph, according to one of the cops who eventually arrived) and smashed up a good half of the windshield.
It was about then that the gravity of the situation sunk in and I started crying. Bawling, actually. Between the 911 operator, the guy from the corner house who called 911, the other driver, the lady who stopped to help, and the two cops I kind of lost track of how many times I had to tell people that I was physically unhurt.
Now here's the irony of this situation. The airbags, installed as a mandatory safety measure, actually caused me and the car more harm than the crash alone. A *safety* device caused harm. Now, the harm to me was mostly psychological. Being temporarily blinded at the moment of impact did *not* help my frame of mind. That smoke, which turned out to be something akin to talcum powder, and the cough it produced didn't help either. The big kicker was the gaping hole in the windshield. Do you have any idea how much new windshields cost?? Low end is around $150.
The harm to the car, obviously, was very physical. There was much more airbag related visual damage than actual impact damage that I could see. The front bumper of my car was cracked up and there was what looked like a black felt strap sticking out, but other than that it was fine. Strictly cosmetic. The engine hadn't even skipped a beat. The windshield, all that broken glass inside and outside of the car, and that whatever it was on the dashboard however...
And the stupid thing didn't even prevent me from hitting the steering wheel! I didn't even come in contact with the airbag at all! I was wearing my seat belt.
I would love to simply tell the body shop to forget about replacing the airbags. Just vacuum up the glass, replace the windshield, and check the headlight alignment. But that would be illegal. Air bags are a necessary part of cars, whether it makes sense or not, that's the law.
You know what? I think air bags are a really stupid idea. That's not to say they haven't come a long way from the early days when they could blow out eardrums and possibly kill someone shorter than, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here's a thought, if you're really worried about people bumping into the steering wheel during an accident, why don't you make the steering column retract on impact? Or use some sort of smart material that will turn rubbery on impact? Or even both. Use the smart material for the part of the wheel you hold and retract the column.
I think it's doable. I mean, there's already a device out there that can stop a circular table saw so fast that it won't even cut your hand a tiny bit. (There are sensors of the blade that detect skin or something like that. It read a hot dog as a human finger so I don't know what exactly it's measuring.) Granted, the mechanisms are shot afterward and have to be replaced, but this is something that stops and retracts a full speed circular saw in a fraction of a second. I think something can be arranged for a car's steering wheel that won't require full replacement on use.