To be fair, any crash above 70mph and the airbag might as well not exist.
The racing world proves this conclusively. Watch Formula 1 or NASCAR and you'll see 200 mph crashes where everyone walks away. Watch motorcycle racing and see guys fall of their bikes at all kinds of speeds and just glide on their backs until they stop, get up and walk away. I went off track at Willow Springs raceway doing 120 mph, no big deal.
People survive crashes in racing regardless of speed not because the crashes typically take place over a long period of time but because they have a seat that fits them well, straps keeping them in it and heat restraints.
Also, going off track is not crashing.
Going off track at 120 MPH was not fun. Dirt, rocks, slashed two tires. Beyond that it was uneventful. The speed just makes it last longer and probably contributed to the huge holes on the tires.
You can have a crash on the highway at 100 MPH and have it be just an uneventful other than a crunched-up car. It's a function of the delta in speed AND the delta in acceleration, angle, forces, etc. In other words, if the car in front of you is decelerating gently vs. violently, etc. Too many permutations to list.
What you don't want is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No7v2ps6ukI
It doesn't even look like they are travelling fast at all.
No, we're agreeing on that.
I'm saying that most of the benefit in a typical racing situation comes from seats and restraints. Look at some of the wrecks from the cup series race last weekend at Indianapolis. They're not walking away because the wreck took a long time. They're walking away because they weren't bouncing around inside.
The human body can survive plenty of G forces.
http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm
"Stapp'd endured 25 Gs. It was the equivalent of a Mach 1.6 ejection at 40,000 feet, a jolt in excess of that experienced by a driver who crashes into a red brick wall at over 120 miles per hour. Only it had lasted perhaps nine times longer. And it had burst nearly every capillary in Stapp's eyeballs. "
"Stapp had already proven what he'd set out to prove: that a pilot, if adequately protected, could survive a high speed, high altitude ejection"
Yet it is true that airbags have probably saved millions of lives as well as untold people from painful, expensive and life changing injuries.
There is no way I would buy a car without airbags. This is one reason I am not into vintage or collectible cars, they are simply not safe and I do not care to drive them.
What do you think an airbag's purpose is?
Google "HANS device". That's a restraint.
The belt does that unless you literally have a rubber neck.
The point of the airbag is to restrain your head so that it does not snap forward too fast and break your neck (heads are heavy, and necks were not built for sudden forward deceleration), that's why it needs to inflate so fast: it has to be fully inflated before you faceplant in it, so that it can slow down your head's forward movement, that's why it has vents and starts deflating as soon as it's fully inflated, and by the time you've stopped it is fully deflated.
If it were a cushion it would have no reason to deflate on its own and the deflation would not, in fact, make any sense at all.
> Google "HANS device". That's a restraint.
The HANS device is a better restraint, it is also a much more cumbersome one and requires wearing a helmet, nobody is going to wear a HANS in their while driving to the corner store.
...and more interestingly, none of the cars have airbags. What they do have, however, are very tight restraints.