I’m glad you did well there.
While I do have a problem with airbags as my mom and a co-worker got their faces re-arranged in what otherwise were very minor accidents - not to mention the hundreds of decapitated kids that the media refused to report on until relatively recently (they didn’t want to “set off a panic” and possibly remove the mandate). Later model cars now have much better air bags, but the earlier ones were literally bombs waiting to go off.
I have no issue with seat belts, though, and if they were not mandated by government, I would want them mandated. To libertarians, sorry, the attitude of the car manufacturers was simply criminal in resisting seat belts. I’m also on board with most other safety features - go into an old car with a sharp steel dashboard and a steering column that won’t collapse in an accident. No thanks!
But I still never saw the numbers on air bags to convince me they are/were worth the thousands of dollars per car that they cost. In my case, I held on to non-airbag cars for 15 years after air bags came out, as I knew what they were doing to people (relative worked at GM then). During that time, I could have bought modern, clean, and otherwise much-safer cars, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
Regarding college funding by the state - you may want to look at the levels of funding in the 1970s before wanting to go back to those levels (even in current-year dollars). I’ll give you a hint - we could double our highway spending if we went back to those levels, and still balance the budget.
Most of those injuries were caused by the fact early airbags only deployed in one way: full, rapid inflation. Since the early 2000’s, modern airbags have two to four deployment modes, and that mean a far lower bag inflation rate when the collision happens at low speeds—which in my case was only 27 mph. As such, except for the minor bruises, I walked away unscathed.