A SPEAR tip against your chest makes for safer driving than an air
bag. Let me become King Shaka’s imbongi
to explain.
Africa’s “Napoleon”, aka King Shaka, is famous for designing the
sawn-off spear, or umkhonto
we sizwe .
As a device to ensure safer driving, the short stabbing spear is a
lot safer than an air bag in our cars.
Air bags, you have to understand, are an American solution to a
problem that did not exist.
The problem was that people who did not wear their seatbelts kept
fatally flattening their faces against their wind shields. To stop the fatal
face flattenings, the Feds threw lots of tax dollars at people in white coats to
study the problem and the white coats advised that instead of encouraging people
too stupid to buckle up to crash, thus removing them from the gene pool, cars
should be fitted with explosive devices that can detonate to fill an air bag
when a sensor detects a crash.
Since then, the average driver has been paying even less attention
while driving, knowing that up to seven air bags will cushion any face
flattenings.
Fixing a foot-long blade so that it juts out of the steering wheel
to nudge the chest of the driver will fix all this inattentiveness at a stroke.
As no formal testing has been done yet, I am only taking a wild
stab at the expected results, but I’m confident that the sawn-off spear would
make our traffic at least 35% safer.
“How?” you ask.
Well, would you even think of texting, giving in to road rage or
taking your eyes off the cars ahead for one nano-second while that sharpened tip
grazed your chest?
Thought not.
But back to air bags. Because of their expense, air bags quickly
became more popular than radios or hubcaps among thieves.
Since 2008, they are one of the top most-stolen items from cars in
the UK, with a ready market among panelbeaters who don’t ask questions. Locally,
panelbeaters even advise owners of fender benders whose air bags “deployed” not
to replace the darn things, but rather to bridge the circuit of the warning
light on the dashboard (with a little plug that costs from R400 on eBay) and
drive with more care in the future.
For the reality is that air bags don’t “deploy”.
They explode.
In the process, they crush babies on front seats, smash in the
faces of petite women who have to sit close to the steering wheel, break the
collar bone of guys with long arsm and use propellants that are so hot they give
third-degree burns and leave a layer of skin-scalding chemicals.
Hence, if you are in the market for a car with optional air
bags — don’t bother.
Invest, instead, in a roll cage, bucket seats and a brace of
over-the-shoulder seat belts.
You won’t be able to move or even breathe much, strapped in thus,
but like a crashed World Rally Championship driver, you will be able to crawl
out of any wreck.
