Now if I had the gall to get on a stage to utter that in a stand-up act I would be introduced to one of those long, crook-ended rods used for dragging something away.
Ah yes, airbags.
The latest glitch to emerge from the wonderful land of automotive technology, albeit a slightly mysterious one because no one knows which of the 60 million or so of these particular brand of airbags actually have an "issue".
It's an issue which involves either not going off upon impact or showering the recipient with small shards of potentially fatal metal pieces when they do activate.
Whoa, that's kind of like that Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter ... who is going to strike it and who is not?
Now many would argue, and rightly so I guess, that a lot more lives have been saved in serious crashes through the assistance of functioning airbags than injuries caused by malfunctioning devices.
Some may consider such statistics as "collateral damage"?
It is a worry though, and just one more of those situations where technology and the pursuit of it for all the right reasons goes wrong due to what has to be a human error ... either in design or construction.
But there is a little more to this whole airbag thing, because it transpires that a lot of imports from Japan may have the passenger airbag systems removed ... because over there they had been given the option of whether they wanted them in there or not.
So they arrive here and it is basically a case of toss a coin to see if there's one in there or not.
Fifty-fifty job.
We have airbags in one car but the soiled (but sound and faithful) old Mitsi from the year of 1996 that I run about in does not. And I don't mind because the seat belts passed the warrant so all is well.
And since 1972 I've ridden motorcycles, on roads and on fast tracks and they never had airbags.
Instead, they had the advantage of the pilot being able to abandon ship and slide away if things went pear-shaped for some reason.
Which, for a time in my errant and pacey years I was quite good at ... to the point where I'd front up at the A&E department and the duty nurse at the counter would look up and say "Hello Roger ... haven't seen you for a few weeks".
This airbag thing brings to mind a time when seatbelts were simply not fitted to cars.
Indeed, it was a long time back and I recall seeing a documentary a few years ago about the American auto safety campaigner Ralph Nader who battled with the big carmakers over there, and the various halls of bureaucracy, to get safety belts into cars.
The general consensus among the manufacturers was that if they put safety belts in their cars that would tell the public they weren't safe.
Unbelievable ... well, no, not really ... odd things happen over there (but we'll leave current politics alone for now).
Ralph eventually got the message through and lives were saved.
Lots of them. Now then, the "threat" of driverless drone-type vehicles is firmly on the horizon, making it another step into the technical unknown and ripe for things to go wrong ... so never was there a better time for seatbelts and airbags to work well.
I'm predicting as the four-wheeled pilotless drones begin to multiply on the roads there will be plenty of opportunities to discover which bags and belts work and which don't.
Which I guess will save the research and development boffins a lot of time and money.
- Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
