A car company must design its air bags for all reasonably foreseeable users of their vehicles. Since car companies know that some of their customers are of short stature, and since some of those consumers sit close to the steering wheel to be able to control the car, they must design their vehicles and their air bags for these consumers. In fact, the car companies typically design their vehicles with the explicit recognition of short stature drivers who will sit with the seat all the way forward. Remember, everyone whose height is average or taller was at one time of shorter stature. For example, teenagers often fall into this category.

The Society of Automotive Engineers has published an industry standard specifically requiring that cars be designed with this in mind. Crash test dummies representing a 5th percentile adult female have been available for crash testing for more than 20 years. Injury criteria for this crash test dummy were developed by the industry decades ago. Despite this, our research has discovered that some car companies failed to conduct any crash testing with these crash test dummies. Some have claimed that they could not conduct such testing because the government did not incorporate the injury criteria into federal regulations at that time. This argument is completely unpersuasive.

First, the federal regulations are minimum standards, and do not represent the state-of-the-art. A manufacturer has always been free to exceed those standards, and could therefore have conducted such testing. Second, the injury criteria were published within the automotive industry, and the car companies could have utilized those published criteria to evaluate the risk of injury to small stature occupants. Third, if a particular car company disagreed with the published injury criteria, it could have developed its own standards. It is telling that those companies who claim that the injury criteria were not “validated” are the ones who never even tried to evaluate or validate them. Fourth, significant information about crash test dummy kinematics (the motion of the crash test dummy during a crash) could be obtained even if the injury measurements were not made. Fifth, it is well known in the industry that small stature females are at greater risk of air bag inflation-induced injuries. Therefore, it is critical to conduct such testing to make sure the air bag is appropriately designed. In my opinion, the car companies who try to justify their failure to use these small size crash test dummies are merely engaging in a junk science post-hoc rationalization of their failure to comply with industry standards.

Those car companies who failed to conduct appropriate testing with a reasonably foreseeable range of occupant sizes were negligent and reckless. In my opinion, this failure to test was often the result of putting profits ahead of safety. It costs money to conduct this testing. A prototype of an all-new vehicle line can cost as much as $500,000, with the actual test cost adding to the total; this provides an incentive for car companies to skip such testing. If the testing reveals a problem (such as the risk of head, neck or chest injury), it can cost many millions of dollars to fix the problem.
Those companies who fail to conduct appropriate testing create an unfair advantage by saving millions of dollars compared to those who do the right thing and conduct all appropriate testing to ensure their air bag systems work appropriately. We as a society should never reward those companies that put profits ahead of safety.  The law allows consumers to hold those car companies accountable for their defects and for their negligence or recklessness in designing and testing air bags.