“Based on the available data, NHTSA does not believe that Chevy Volts or other electric vehicles pose a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in an e-mailed statement.

The conclusion by NHTSA came two weeks after General Motors Co. told Volt owners to bring the vehicles to dealerships for repair.

The government started investigating the Volt after a side- impact crash test in May led to a fire three weeks later. During that test, the lithium-ion battery pack broke open and coolant leaked into the battery. When the car was physically rotated as part of the test, more coolant leaked into a circuit board, leading to a fire. NHTSA replicated the fire in November and started an official probe Nov. 25.

“GM is proud of the technological innovation the Volt represents,” Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “We appreciate the confidence our Volt customers continued to provide during the investigation.”

The June fire occurred following a May 12 crash test at a facility in Wisconsin run by contractor MGA Research Inc., which notified the regulator that the blaze burned a line of cars parked near the Volt, NHTSA said yesterday in its report.

The agency and its investigators concluded in July that the fire originated in the Volt battery and performed another side- impact test on a Volt in September. That crash, which didn’t penetrate the battery compartment, didn’t lead to a fire. NHTSA, which tested Volt batteries in November with the Energy and Defense departments, hadn’t previously disclosed the September crash test.

The June Volt fire was reported Nov. 11 by Bloomberg.

The Volt blaze had little effect on sales of the vehicles, so there may not be any significant improvement with the government completing its investigation, said Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of auto-researcher Edmunds.com, in an e-mail.

“Volt buyers tend to be passionate about their vehicle,” Anwyl said. “They really want an electrified vehicle. The small risk represented by the potential for fire wouldn’t have been an obstacle for this group of buyers.”

The attention focused on the Volt fire was, in part, a result of the vehicle’s new technology, Anwyl said.

“We see gasoline powered vehicles blow up in the movies all the time,” he said. “A vehicle with batteries catches fire and it is portrayed as a big deal.”
Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, plans to hold a hearing on Jan. 25 about the fires and the regulator’s handling of the incidents. GM Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson and NHTSA Administrator David Strickland are scheduled to testify.

Issa has asked whether President Barack Obama’s administration kept silent about the fires because of its interest in the success of GM’s government-backed restructuring and a U.S. goal of having 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told reporters in December it was “absolutely not true” that his agency withheld information about the Volt’s safety.

GM, based in Detroit, said Jan. 5 it would provide a fix to the 8,000 plug-in hybrids it has sold, to reduce the risk of a post-crash fire. Strickland said in Detroit Jan. 8 that the agency was pleased with GM’s plan.

The Treasury Department owns 32 percent of GM’s stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

GM, which held the spot for almost eight decades before being dethroned by Toyota Motor Corp. in 2008, on Thursday disclosed it sold a bit more than nine million cars and trucks worldwide last year, a 7.6 percent rise over 2010. That would put it ahead of VW, which recently reported global sales totaled 8.16 million vehicles last year, reported The Wall Street Journal.

But shortly after GM’s disclosure, Volkswagen argued it, in fact, was the top-seller last year if sales of its affiliates are included. Volkswagen’s figures don’t include the contributions of majority-ownership stakes in truck makers MAN SE and Scania AB, which will be added in a few weeks, a Volkswagen spokesman said. The truck makers might add 200,000 vehicles to VW’s sales total.

GM’s rivals also point out that the big U.S. auto maker’s numbers are boosted by ownership stakes in China’s SAIC Motor Corp. and Liuzhou Wuling Motors Co. While SAIC builds GM cars in China, Wuling’s 1.2 million vehicles last year are mostly cheap commercial vehicles used only in China.

A GM spokesman said the company no longer focuses on being the world’s largest auto maker. “Our goal is to be the best, not necessarily the biggest,” said Jim Cain, a spokesman for GM. “If we had announced plans on world domination, we probably would have been quibbling with the sales of our competitors and that’s as far removed from focusing on the customers as you can get.”

Some analysts prefer not to count the Wuling vehicles in GM’s global total because GM doesn’t have a controlling stake in its partner. “We have to draw the line somewhere and this at least gives us some consistency around the globe,” said Jeff Schuster, an analyst with forecasting firm LMC Automotive.

The tiff over global sales has parallels to a similar one earlier this month when BMW AG and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz delayed reporting their U.S. sales by a day, each hoping to beat out the other for the title of America’s top-selling luxury brand. BMW won by a nose.

Who is No. 1 and No. 2 globally isn’t the industry’s only unanswered question. Toyota appears to have dropped to fourth in the world behind the alliance of France’s Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co., as long as you accept the alliance’s counting methodology. Nissan-Renault, which essentially operate as a single company and are run by one chief executive, said they sold 8.03 million vehicles in 2011. That includes 638,000 vehicles sold by Russia’s AvtoVAZ OAO, in which Renault holds a 25 percent stake. The alliance has signaled its intention to increase its ownership to 50 percent, but hasn’t done it yet.

Toyota, meanwhile, said in December it expects 2011 sales to be around 7.91 million, down 6 percent, but it hasn’t released official figures yet. Japan’s largest auto maker was slowed because the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan forced the company to cut global production and curtailed sales at home and abroad. In Japan, Toyota’s domestic sales dropped 26.8 percent in 2011, a big contributor to its fall in the global rankings.

The Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association recently forecast motor vehicle sales will rise 19 percent this year, to about five million cars, trucks and buses. That would be about the same as in 2008, before the global financial crisis hurt economies around the world but is still below the level of 5.7 million to 5.9 million reached in the early 2000s.

While the rankings are mostly about bragging rights, the accounting methods has become a near annual scuffle as the competition between the top several auto makers increases. Whether to count the sales from affiliate auto makers is a point of contention.

Volkswagen has stated an intention to sell 10 million vehicles a year by 2018.

Rebecca Lindland, a senior analyst at IHS Automotive Consulting, said there is no clear guideline for what to count and what not to count, creating a headache for firms like hers.

“It’s sort of like when you have a lot of step-brothers and sisters and someone asks you how many siblings you have,” she said. “It hasn’t worked out so great for the last couple who have been number one.”

Ms. Lindland said she was involved in an internal discussion lasting more than an hour about whether to combine Chrysler Group LLC’s figures with Fiat SpA. “It’s very annoying, and it’s also meaningless. The important thing is whether they are making money.” Eventually IHS did combine the two, she said.

Saab North America, which is based in Royal Oak and has about 50 employees, said it is halting warranty coverage on current vehicles and models for sale at dealerships in the wake of Monday’s bankruptcy filing by its parent Saab Automobile AB in Sweden, reported The Detroit News.

Saab spokeswoman Michele Tinson said the company has also stopped dealer incentive payments for vehicles at showrooms. Only a few thousand Saab vehicles are at its 188 U.S. dealer showrooms.

GM spokesman Jim Cain said GM is working to notify Saab customers that it will step in.

“In the event Saab cannot or will not fulfill its obligations to administer the warranty programs with its U.S. and Canadian dealers through Saab Cars North America or otherwise, GM will take necessary steps to ensure that remaining warranty obligations on Saab vehicles marketed by GM in the United States and Canada will be honored,” he said.

Saab has about 48,000 vehicles registered in the United States, GM said. Most of those would be covered by GM’s warranties.

GM sold Saab to Dutch luxury automaker Spyker in February 2010, one of four brands it off-loaded in bankruptcy.

Saab North America’s board of directors began meeting around noon Tuesday and was still meeting at 5 p.m, Tinson said.

The North American unit is still operating and hasn’t filed for bankruptcy.

It’s not clear what the company’s next step will be.

A deal to sell Saab to Chinese investors was blocked by GM, which provided key technology to Saab and still holds preferred shares in the automaker.

GM refused to go along with the move, citing intellectual property concerns.

Absent a last-minute investment deal, Saab is likely to be liquidated.

Saab has built few cars since March and struggled to pay its bills.

Mr. Wagoner picked his hometown of Richmond, Va., to make his first public appearance since 2009, when he was ousted from GM by the Obama administration as a condition of the government’s rescue of the company. He addressed 1,100 winter graduates at Virginia Commonwealth University, reported The Wall Street Journal.

His speech was short—roughly 12 minutes. Beforehand, he fended off several interview requests, including one from the local paper that has covered him since he was captain of the high-school basketball team. He barely mentioned GM, but talked to graduates about taking risks and accepting defeat gracefully.

It was a fitting speech for an executive who often was visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, but popular among those who worked for him.

The 58-year-old former CEO’s only mention of GM came as he tried to convey to his audience the importance of accepting challenges. He said he never wanted to live in New York or overseas, though those were his first assignments from GM, and he benefited from them.

“I was willing to go just about anywhere in the U.S. for the best job—except New York City,” he said. “Of course, I received a job offer from GM—in New York City.”

“Don’t worry about planning every step of your life,” he added.

Mr. Wagoner rose to prominence at age 39 when he was named GM’s youngest-ever chief financial officer and heir apparent to then-CEO Jack Smith.

He succeeded his mentor in 2000, and became one of the highest-profile CEOs in the world and the face of Detroit. The way he ran GM played a major role in shaping the direction of the global auto industry.

He kept car sales going in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a “Keep America Rolling” campaign and heavy use of incentives.

Detroit’s smaller auto makers, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC, were forced to follow GM’s lead and, to some extent, Toyota Motor Corp. and other auto makers did as well.

When Mr. Wagoner entered GM into an alliance with Italian auto maker Fiat SpA, the move triggered a string of similar alliances around the world.

His focus on high-margin trucks and sport-utility vehicles, at the expense of passenger cars, in many ways defined Detroit’s strategy. After GM bought Hummer, the line of military-like SUVs, Ford followed with the purchase of Land Rover.

While Mr. Wagoner’s strategies helped propel GM to multibillion-dollar profits, particularly in the 1990s when he headed the company’s North American operations, they ultimately contributed to its downfall.

GM began racking up losses in the mid-2000s, amid sales declines and skyrocketing health-care costs. By 2008, truck sales were tanking and GM’s cars couldn’t compete with those built by Toyota and Honda Motor Co. of Japan.

Mr. Wagoner closed factories and reduced head count, but many of his steps to shore up GM came too late and fell short.

During his tenure, GM had losses of $85 billion. He struck a landmark deal with the union to offload retiree costs into a union trust in 2005, but three years later the company still owed the fund billions. He fought against a bankruptcy filing, fearing it would cause a customer exodus that would be fatal to GM. And he resisted cutting unprofitable brands and models, moves the Obama administration forced in bankruptcy, along with further job cuts, factory closures and steps to shed billions in debt through bankruptcy.

In early 2009, as GM pleaded for a government bailout, Mr. Wagoner told President Barack Obama’s automotive task force that he would step down if it meant saving GM. It did, and he resigned in March.

After leaving GM, Mr. Wagoner dug into work at his alma mater, Duke University, where he was named head of the board of directors earlier this year.

Two of his three sons are Duke graduates, and a third now is attending the school. Mr. Wagoner also sits on the boards of Washington Post Co. and Detroit Country Day High School.

Though he doesn’t talk about GM in public, Mr. Wagoner talks regularly to former co-workers at the company, inquiring often about how people are doing, according to several people who keep in touch with him.

Shortly after GM’s current CEO, Dan Akerson, took over last fall, Mr. Wagoner met with him to talk about the company.

“He’s still incredibly loyal to GM,” said one former executive who stays in contact with Mr. Wagoner.

Mr. Wagoner closed his address Saturday with a quote from Mother Teresa: ” ‘What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight,’ ” he said. ” ‘Build anyway.’ “

“We have reviewed Saab’s proposed changes regarding the sale of the company. Nothing in the proposal changes GM’s position. We are unable to support the transaction,” GM spokesman Jim Cain said.

The latest announcement may mean the end of the struggling Swedish luxury automaker as early as this week, according to The Detroit News. Saab’s North American headquarters is in Royal Oak.

GM licenses the technology Saab uses to produce several key models. GM has raised concerns about the intellectual property it has licensed to the company.

In early November, GM said it would not support the sale of Saab Automobile AB to two Chinese automakers.

Saab said Monday it was in talks on a revised deal to sell itself to one of the automakers — Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile Co. Ltd. — and an unnamed Chinese bank.

Saab, which is reorganizing in Sweden under court protection from creditors, has faced mounting financial problems this year as several funding sources fell through.

It has built few vehicles since late March, its employees have suffered through payless paydays, and it hasn’t been able to pay many of its bills.

Saab’s restructuring administrator, Guy Lofalk, may end efforts to try to revive Saab, the Swedish business daily Dagens Industri reported. “I immediately have to decide if it really is possible to continue this restructuring,” he told the paper.

Last week, GM attorneys met with Lofalk and the Swedish ambassador to the United States, Jonas Hafstrom. The two discussed efforts to save Saab, but the meeting didn’t result in any concrete proposals. Saab sent GM a new proposed ownership structure on Friday, which didn’t meet GM’s concerns.

GM is Saab’s former parent company. Saab was one of four brands GM opted to shed during 2009 bankruptcy restructuring.

In October, Pang Da Automobile Trade Co. and Zhejiang Youngman said they had agreed to buy Saab from its Dutch owner Swedish Automobile NV.

The sale price was $140 million in exchange for $600 million in funding to keep the company afloat.

Reuters reported Pang Da said in China on Monday it is still talking to Saab, though it wasn’t named by Saab on Monday as a possible buyer.

GM said some vehicles have a power vacuum brake boost pushrod retention nut that was not properly tightened; the nut could loosen and allow the pushrod to separate from the brake pedal, reported The Detroit News.

On Oct. 28, GM discovered the problem and issued a stop-sale the following day for the 2012 CTS vehicles, which means they couldn’t be sold before they were inspected and repaired if necessary.

GM spokesman Alan Adler said Friday no crashes or injuries had been reported because of the condition and that most of the vehicles being recalled were still at dealerships or on their way to dealerships.

GM dealers will inspect the vehicles and if necessary tighten the nuts. GM notified owners and dealers on Nov. 1.

G.M. said its third-quarter profit fell 12 percent, to $1.73 billion, or $1.03 a share, largely because of higher marketing and engineering costs. Revenue increased 8 percent, to $36.72 billion, but was down about $200 a vehicle, according to The New York Times.

Its chief executive, Daniel F. Akerson, declared the performance “not good enough.” The results compared with $1.96 billion, or $1.20 a share, in the period a year earlier.

The company earned $2.2 billion in North America but lost money in Europe, South America and its “international” division, excluding China, even though sales increased in every region and 9 percent over all. Executives said the carmaker would fall short of its goal to break even this year in Europe, before taxes and restructuring costs, as economic conditions there worsen.

Globally, G.M. said, fourth-quarter profits will be roughly the same as a year ago, which analysts said would translate to more than 40 percent below their estimates.

G.M. shares, already down 39 percent for the year, tumbled 10.9 percent, to $22.31, on Wednesday after the results were released. The drop has delayed the federal government’s plans to sell the 500 million G.M. shares it still owns, allowing the shadow of taxpayer ownership to linger over the company as executives work to make progress in its turnaround. The shares amount to a 26 percent stake.

“G.M. delivered a solid quarter thanks to our leadership positions in North America and China, where we have grown both sales and market share this year,” Mr. Akerson said in a statement. “But solid isn’t good enough, even in a tough economy. Our overall results underscore the work we have to do to leverage our scale and further improve our margins everywhere we do business.”

Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with the research firm IHS Automotive, said G.M. still needs to pare expenses to be successful long term but can only go so far in areas like product development.

“Toyota and Honda products are suffering right now because they were designed under tremendous cost pressure and it shows in cheap interiors and disappointing product reviews,” said Ms. Lindland, who is based in Greenwich, Conn. “G.M. simply cannot afford to sacrifice product for pennies. They must continue to build products that consumers are willing to pay for, and that’s much more likely to require significant investment.”

G.M., which went through bankruptcy protection in 2009 and executed the nation’s largest public stock offering nearly a year ago, has earned $7.1 billion through the first nine months of 2011. Its profit for all of 2010 was $4.7 billion.

On a conference call with analysts and reporters, Mr. Akerson said the losses in Europe and South America were “not sustainable and not acceptable.” G.M. this week appointed a new European president, Karl-Friedrich Stracke, and assigned him the task of speeding the division’s reorganization.

G.M. lost $292 million in the third quarter in Europe, about half as much as a year ago, but it had been profitable there in the second quarter and will continue to lose money there in the current quarter, G.M.’s chief financial officer, Daniel Ammann, said. He declined to say specifically how G.M. would address the situation, with actions like closing factories or cutting large numbers of jobs in Europe.

“There’s nothing that’s off the table,” Mr. Ammann said on a conference call later Wednesday.

Meanwhile, North America, the source of its biggest troubles before bankruptcy, has become its strongest asset, with pretax profits totaling $7.3 billion so far this year, even as sales shift toward small cars that cost less than the trucks and sport utility vehicles that were the lifeblood of the old G.M.

“Clearly, customers are seeing value in the vehicles we’re putting into the marketplace,” Mr. Ammann said. “Our margins aren’t where we want them to be, but we have a pretty clear road map, and we understand where the gaps are.”

In September, G.M.’s 48,500 hourly workers ratified a new four-year labor agreement that gave them bonuses of $5,000 but no wage increases except for those on the entry-level pay scale. G.M. said the deal, which calls for creating or retaining 6,400 jobs and moving some work to the United States from Mexico, increases the company’s labor costs by only about 1 percent a year.

G.M. was the most profitable of the three Detroit automakers in the third quarter. The Ford Motor Company earned $1.6 billion, and Chrysler earned $212 million.

“Although General Motors is open to the continued supply of powertrains and other components to Saab under appropriate terms and conditions, G.M. will not agree to the continuation of the existing technology licenses or the continued supply of 9-4X vehicles to Saab following the proposed change in ownership as it would not be in the best interests of G.M. shareholders,” said Jim Cain, a G.M. spokesman.

The statement represented a hardening in G.M.’s opposition to the proposed rescue plan for Saab and appeared to lengthen the odds for the brand’s survival. On Friday, G.M. said that it would be difficult to support a sale of Saab if it hurt G.M.’s competitive position in China and other key markets, reported The New York Times.

Swedish Automobile, the struggling company that owns Saab, said it would discuss General Motor’s objections with the company.

“I expect this to happen tomorrow. There are always alternatives but we only have limited time,” the chief executive of Swedish Automobile, Victor R. Muller, told Reuters in a text message.

Pang Da Automobile Trade and Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile have struck a deal to buy Saab from Swedish Automobile, in what amounts to a rescue plan for Saab, which was formerly owned by G.M. The sale, however, awaits approval from G.M., which has preferred shares in Saab and has supplied it with crucial components. In addition, the Saab 9-4X, a crossover vehicle, is based on G.M.’s Cadillac SRX and is built at a G.M. plant in Mexico.

Separately, G.M. said that D.Nick Reilly, the head of its European business, would retire after 37 years with the company and be succeeded by Karl-Friedrich Stracke, chief executive of Opel/Vauxhall.

Mr. Stracke will keep his current title after he takes over as president of GM Europe on Jan. 1, G.M. said. GM Europe comprises Opel, Vauxhall, Cadillac Europe and Chevrolet Europe.

Steve Rattner served as the administration’s top auto official for six months in 2009. A paperback version of his 2010 book, “Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry,” was released earlier this month with a new epilogue, reported The Detroit News.

“It’s a story with a happy ending,” Rattner said in a recent interview over lunch, noting he sat down with GM and Chrysler’s new CEOs this summer as he updated his account. “The progress that both companies have made since then is really quite remarkable.”

He especially praised the turnaround engineered at Chrysler by CEO Sergio Marchionne, who also runs Fiat SpA.

Last week, Chrysler posted a quarterly profit of $212 million — compared with a loss of $84 million in the third quarter last year — as its revenue jumped 19 percent to $13.1 billion.

“Chrysler is amazing. I would have never in a million years bet that Sergio could do what he’s done,” Rattner said, praising the freshening of Chrysler’s product line and holding the line on cash flow and bottom line. “They had a rough start, because we didn’t leave them with a lot.”Marchionne told Rattner that Chrysler was focused on allocating scarce capital. “Everything is vetted, flicked, scrubbed. There’s continuous analysis of the alternatives and the cheapest way to get an answer,” Marchionne said, according to the new epilogue.

The Treasury extended Chrysler a $12.5 billion bailout, and recovered $11.3 billion. By contrast, it gave GM a $49.5 billion bailout, and has recovered $23.2 billion. At current trading prices, the Treasury would lose more than $13 billion on its GM bailout.

Rattner says in the new material that after GM’s successful IPO in November 2010, he got emotional: “The cameras showed the first trade occurring on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I teared up and almost began crying.”

Obama’s advisers had been divided in March 2009 whether to save Chrysler, but Obama was persuaded by Rattner and others to do so — if Chrysler could tie up with Fiat. “He made all the right decisions, stood behind us and I think he deserves credit for it, and that’s what I wrote in the book,” he said. “On autos, (the White House) worked better than I ever would have imagined.”

Rattner said the auto task force told Larry Summers, who was then the head of the National Economic Council, that the government could expect to hold its GM stock “for five to eight years,” based on a study of other government interventions in the auto sector, especially in Europe.

Rattner said GM’s stock could still jump, noting he had mixed feelings about the government’s sale of nearly half of its stake at $33 a share. “The movie’s not over yet. Two years from now, the stock could be at $60 and everyone will say why did we sell any?”

He said he doesn’t believe the government’s 27 percent stake is costing GM sales, and he thinks the government should wait until the stock price rises.
On Monday, GM’s stock fell 60 cents to $25.84, down 2.3 percent.

In the epilogue, Rattner predicts that including the government $17.2 billion bailout of Detroit-based lender Ally Financial Inc., that the “current potential recovery for taxpayers” is all but $10 billion of its auto industry bailout.

“If in the end taxpayers spend $10 billion on the auto rescues, it seems a small price to pay for averting a major economic calamity,” Rattner wrote.

In retrospect, Rattner wishes that the government hadn’t given 10 percent of the equity in new GM that exited bankruptcy to the old GM bondholders. He says those claims should have been “worthless.”

He also said that the auto task force perhaps should have modified GM and Chrysler’s “overly generous pension plans.”

“In my postmortems with auto industry leaders, I was gratified to hear that they felt we had gotten nearly all of it right. Maybe we should have killed GMC, as some had suggested during the restructuring,” Rattner said.

Rattner is managing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s fortune and the funds for his charitable foundation. He also writes a lot of op-eds, regularly appears on TV and makes speeches.

The air bag will debut on the 2013 Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia and Buick Enclave, the automaker said Thursday. GM won’t say what other vehicles will get this new air bag in the future, but it’s easy to speculate that a lot of them will. Safety sells and sells well.

No one should be surprised that this air bag was created. Side impacts are one of the biggest challenges facing safety engineers.

Unlike the front and rear of a vehicle, which have crumple zones, breakaway points and fascinating design work that pushes the energy of an accident around the cabin, the side offers only a few inches of metal and glass between people and the vehicle hitting them.

Every carmaker offers at least the minimum of protection with air bags, and it’s quickly becoming standard for cars to come with at least six air bags throughout a cabin.

Some offer eight, 10 or even 12 air bags. But GM’s approach is unique in the industry. The carmaker worked with supplier Takata Corp. for three years to develop the air bag known as the front center air bag.

It’s attached to the driver’s seat and inflates during any side impact or rollover, said Scott Thomas, a senior staff engineer at GM.

The idea was to find a way to help people caught in far-side impacts; in the case of a driver, this would mean the vehicle was struck on the passenger side. Typically, in a far-side impact, a body is violently thrown toward the impact side, toward the center of the vehicle.

In all of the other directions, many cars offer some sort of air bag protection. There are front, side curtain, side and even knee air bags in many cars. Ford Motor Co. recently deployed air bags on seat belts to help distribute force better during a collision.

“This is revolutionary technology,” Thomas said. “We didn’t develop it because of regulations, but because this will benefit GM customers.”

Indeed. GM saw the need for the bag because 11 percent of traffic deaths last year resulted from far-side impacts. U.S. traffic deaths dropped 3.2 percent in 2010 to 32,788 fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; they fell, in part, because of all of the safety devices carmakers include in vehicles. There’s still room for more.

So adding another air bag is not just a good idea, it’s one that could very well save lives.