Not 158 in one year, 158 "to date" as of the year 2000 (source below):
http://www.airbag-law.com/index.html
"As of April 1, 2000, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's Special Crash Investigation (SCI) has confirmed a total of 158 fatalities induced by airbag deployment. Of that total, 92 were children, 60 were drivers, and 6 were adult passengers."
Also, most of the fatalities occurred from being sitting too close to the airbag or not wearing a safety belt. From the wikipedia source again: "These fatalities have predominantly occurred when the children and adults were positioned precariously close to the compartment where the air bag was housed. Most of the children killed were not secured by safety belts and were thrown forward during pre-crash breaking, placing their heads just inches from the air bag when it deployed. Therefore, the best defense during an air bag deployment is to be wearing a safety belt."
Thanks for the correction. It's too late for me to edit my comment, or I'd change it.
Regardless, my point isn't that airbags are a problem. They clearly save lives on balance.
The point is that car manufacturers are happy to add features to cars that buyers want even when those features might kill people. On the other end, manufacturers have removed critical safety features to save a dollar or less on production costs, and those decisions also have killed people. [1]
In this case, though, it's more like airbags, where, on balance, more lives are saved than lost as a result of the feature. At least in theory.
Wikipedia puts it at 175 fatalities between 1990 and 2000 (source: http://web.archive.org/web/20080226234316/http://www.nsc.org...). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Airbag_fatality_statist...
Also, most of the fatalities occurred from being sitting too close to the airbag or not wearing a safety belt. From the wikipedia source again: "These fatalities have predominantly occurred when the children and adults were positioned precariously close to the compartment where the air bag was housed. Most of the children killed were not secured by safety belts and were thrown forward during pre-crash breaking, placing their heads just inches from the air bag when it deployed. Therefore, the best defense during an air bag deployment is to be wearing a safety belt."