Major automakers, for decades, heaped scorn on air bags and resisted making them standard equipment. At the start, 40 years ago or so, most people could not be persuaded to buckle up; this was before states passed laws mandating seatbelt use. Soon enough, interest turned to the air bag, a "passive" instrument that required no action by the driver and the passenger. If their car crashed, a balloon-like cushion would pop up on its own to protect them. Naturally, installing this device would make a car more expensive. In their fashion, the big auto companies balked, a stance that they maintained for many years, until their resistance finally wore out.

Not that air bags were perfect. They were initially designed with 165-pound adults in mind. That made smaller people, especially children, vulnerable to injury from the explosive force of the air bag's opening. In the 1990s, 175 people died in this manner, more than 100 of them children, according to the United States' National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Terrible as that toll was, it lay in the balance against nearly 6,400 lives said to have been saved by air bags in that decade. Later improvements corrected many of the one-size-doesn't-fit-all shortcomings, though problems remained. A New York Times investigation, its results published on Friday, found that exploding air bags produced by a Japanese supplier were linked to two deaths and dozens of injuries in vehicles from Honda and other automakers. Slowly across the past decade, millions of potentially troubled vehicles have been recalled.

Will future vehicles even need these gadgets? Cars are becoming marvels of artificial intelligence, able to avert accidents entirely with sensors that, for instance, can warn a motorist that he or she is veering perilously into someone else's lane or getting too close to the vehicle up ahead.