Mo Big Bro: The U.S. will not let a $1 Million dollar sports car into the U.S., because it doesn’t have child approved air bags… WTF?
Italian automaker Pagani was to begin selling its $1 million, 700 horsepower Huayra supercar in the U.S. later this year but federal safety regulators have said “Not so fast.”
Pagani had applied for an exemption from federal auto safety rules requiring child-safe “advanced” airbags, arguing that complying with the rule would have caused “substantial economic hardship,” according to documents from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
NHTSA denied the request, essentially blocking the car from sale in the U.S., because Pagani failed to show that installing the airbags on the twin-turbocharged 12-cylinder carbon-titanium car would cause the company undue financial strain. Also, the Italian carmaker didn’t show that serious efforts had been made to comply, the agency said.
Pagani created the Huayra as part of the automaker’s plan to break into the U.S. market. The car was engineered and crash tested to meet safety standards in both the U.S. and Europe.
Pagani insists it will sell the car here, just not in 2012 as it had planned. The Huayra will now go on sale some time in 2013, Paganai spokeswoman Sanaz Bakhtiari said.
Advanced airbags are designed to sense when children or small adults are in the vehicle and adjust the force with which they deploy accordingly. Early airbags were found to injure — and even kill — small children.
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