Also, I can imagine additional advantages of AEB. If someone's tailgating, just hit your brakes enough that their AEB will trigger.
> in the period 1991-2001 [...] about 109,000 lives were saved by belts and 8,000 by airbags
so I guess seat belts were a bigger improvement.
Also airbags depend on seatbelt use to be effective, and some of them have killed people.
In what world is it better to NOT have airbags?
Remember the takata airbag defect killed 15 people in the US. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/takata-a...
Not by a long shot - seat belts reduce the chance of death by 60-70% across all crashes. Airbags reduce the chance of death by 15% in frontal collisions, and very little for other types[1]. The airbag isn’t going to much good if you’ve been ejected from the car.
[1]:http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittPorter20...
That’s why modern cars try to avoid firing them unless absolutely necessary. You can get into a pretty serious crash and they won’t fire if the computer decides its better to let you gently tap the steering wheel than to run an expkosion into your face.
Fun example of an old and new Renault Espace crashing into each other: https://youtu.be/vRxLlFm3VUA
Not to mention the current situation with Takata, where they have had instances of their airbags directly killing people due to a failure of the metal housing, which turns to shrapnel.
That depends on how you count: no life saved by an airbag would be saved without airbag AND safety belt. An airbag alone saves no lives.
And I still doubt the airbag+belt combination made a bigger dent in the statistic than the introduction of the safety belt did (Although it's hard to compare due to completely different time periods)
I did mean seat belt + air bag vs seat belt alone. But even then, air bags apparently improve seat belt protection by less than 20%.
I was thinking of dramatic high-speed frontal collisions with ~immovable objects. Where forces from seat belts alone can cause damage.