I believe MB, plus most other luxury automakers have a lot of ways to adjust airbag deployment:

• They'll detect if the seatbelt is plugged in
• The weight of the occupant, if it thinks it's a child, it'll turn it off
• They have child seat detection (I think MB calls it "babysafe")

Then they also have limits to determine whether to deploy the airbag at all, and different limits for two-stage airbags.

But I've never heard anyone from any other automaker talk about the kind of airbag deployment customization that Musk was talking about. I can't recall anyone ever saying anything about measuring seating position. Typically automakers rely on people being seated and buckled to even do things like identifying children based on weight.

Saying that an unbuckled child could survive is borderline crazy, it might be true, but I can't imagine any other auto exec making that kind of claim. Partly because of liability, but also because I've never heard of anyone having the level of customizable deployment to even attempt to model for an unbuckled child. As far as I know the default behavior for most automakers, MB included is to disable the airbag if a child is detected. I haven't seen anyone talk about the behavior if they detect an unbuckled child, maybe they have something programmed for that, but I don't believe anyone's ever mentioned it?