Why Safety Belts Are So Important

A seat belt, also known as a safety belt, is a safety feature included in vehicles for the purpose of saving lives and preventing injuries during a collision. Under the law they must be used by all drivers, and many states have passed laws requiring children and front seat passengers to be strapped in while in a moving vehicle. So why are these laws being passed? How to seat belts work and what makes them so important?

 What to Safety Belts Do? 

 A safety belt is created to provide restraint in the event of a collision. When you are involve in a car crash, the motion of your vehicle is stopped or altered faster than your body can adjust, meaning you will keep moving even after your vehicle has stopped. If you are not restrained, your body will naturally keep up this momentum, causing you to hit whatever is in front of you, from a car seat to a windshield. This is called inertia.

 Ejection from a vehicle is a frightening and typically fatal possibility for those involved in a car accident who are not wearing their seat belt. Your body will continue at the speed you were traveling at before the collision, meaning you can be ejected at great lengths after an accident. It is very simple to avoid this from happening to you or someone you care about: always keep your safety belt on and make all your passengers wear theirs as well.

 Safety Belt Statistics · 

Over 60% of all people killed in accidents were not wearing their seat belt. ·

Around 7% of individuals not wearing their seat belts that are involved in a car accident will suffer severe spine injuries. ·

Individuals ejected from their vehicle in a collision are 25 times more likely to die from the crash than those who remained in the car.

 Seat belts keep you in your vehicle and keep you from coming into contact with parts of your vehicle, such as the doors, windows or windshield. It is this proven effectiveness at preventing fatalities that has pushed legislators to require seat belt use for all drivers and some passengers.

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Car Safety Design and Manufacturing Flaws

Even the safest cars can become hazardous if they suffer from design and manufacturing flaws. Modern automobiles have numerous advantages over their predecessors, such as specially designed crumple zones; driver, passenger and side curtain airbags that deploy within a fraction of a second should on-board sensors detect an accident; and seat-belt restraints that maintain a consistent area of pressure throughout the body of a passenger in order to disburse the affect of a collision over wider body surface area.

 These marvels of safety innovation have saved countless lives, and would undoubtedly save countless more. But what happens when the very innovations designed to save lives take them, or fail to activate at the appropriate time? Drivers take for granted these safety features, but if defective products work their way into a car design it is the innocent that sometimes pay for these mistakes with their lives.

 Though no one should drive recklessly because they think that their auto safety features will save them, the sense of security they bring to the driving experience is often a factor in the purchase of a vehicle. To that end, auto manufacturers have a duty and a responsibility to not include defective devices in the design or manufacture of their cars.

 Some of the most common points of failure and defective devices in automobiles include:

 Airbags: Even though airbags have made astounding leaps and bounds in performance and safety over the last few generations of automobiles, they are technologically complex pieces of equipment with numerous failure points. A faulty crash sensor, defective deploying device or a failure to properly recalibrate the airbag after a previous accident could seriously imperil the lives of the drivers and passengers that depend on these devices to save their lives in case of a car accident.

Seat belts: Like airbags, seatbelts are a vital safety feature included in every car sold in the United States. In fact, 49 states mandate their use, as they can prevent a passenger being thrown from a vehicle during a high speed collision or rollover so common to the SUVs and other cars that frequent American roads. Unfortunately, if a car manufacturer uses defective seat belt latches that fail to secure the strap across a person, or a belt that cannot support the weight of a person when accelerated to accident speeds, the company that built the car and designed the seat belt can sometimes be held liable for their oversight in a court of law.

Crumple zones: Crumple zones are features in cars that all the car to "crunch up" when they impact another car or other solid object. Though it seems counter-intuitive, by allowing the body of a car to absorb the shock of an impact it prevents that energy from being diverted to the passengers, and because the high grade materials used in modern cars is stronger than the human body, this feature can save lives.

Unfortunately, if a car manufacturer builds a car based on a defective design, these crumple zones can become killer zones. Defective designed crumple zones can have jagged metal struts that protrude into passenger compartments, or have metal that crunches up a bit too well, crushing the innocent people trapped inside.

Cars are a vital part of American life, and people trust them to be as safe as possible during an accident. However, a defectively designed or manufactured safety feature can quickly turn a routine accident into a scene of untold agony and misery.

 When selecting an automobile, always check to see if your car is up to standard in all its safety devices. You owe it to yourself, your family, and the other drivers on the road. A little foresight before will save you enormous agony later.

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Seat Belts: Safety On The Road

Volvo has the honor of being the first to implement seat belts in 1849. The first U.S. patent for automobile seat belts was issued to Edward J. Claghorn of New York, New York on February 10, 1885. This patent was described as a Safety-Belt for tourists that was "designed to be applied to a the person, and provided with hooks and other attachments for securing the person to a fixed object." Failure to wear seat belts is responsible for more fatalities than any other single traffic behavior. In all of the traffic accidents reported for 1999, 63% of fatalities were not wearing seat belts.

 Wearing a seat belt use is still the single most effective thing we can do to prevent unnecessary traffic deaths and injuries on America's roadways. Traffic data suggests that education alone is not enough to convince young people, especially males from ages 16 to 25 of the dangers of not using seat belts. This age group is caught up in the belief in their immortality due to their young age. It is this age group that also exhibits the most violation of drunk driving laws.

 They are also the most prone to speeding, and other traffic related law violations. Because of this, it has been suggested that stronger seat belt laws and higher visibility enforcement campaigns be enforced to make them buckle up. Seat belts are the most effective safety devices in vehicles today, estimated to save 9,500 lives each year. If 90 percent of Americans buckle up, it could prevent more than 5,500 deaths and 132,000 injuries annually.

 The cost of unbuckled drivers and passengers goes beyond those killed and the loss to their families. Everyone pays for this negligence. It may be in the form of higher taxes, higher health insurance fees, and higher medical costs. Imagine running as fast as you can, into a wall. You'd expect to get pretty banged up. What if while running at full speed a wall suddenly appeared in front of you? Would you be able to stop instantaneously? This is exactly the situation one faces when the front of his or her car hits something at only 15 miles an hour.

The car stops in the first tenth of a second, but you keep on at the same rate you were going in the car until something stops you, the steering wheel, dashboard or windshield, if you're not wearing your safety belt. If this could happen at 15 miles an hour, imagine what a 30 mile per hour collision would result in? It would be the same as hitting the pavement after a 3 story fall.

 A properly worn safety belt keeps that second collision - the human collision, from happening. "Properly worn" means with both straps safely fitted to transfer the impact of the collision to the parts of your body that can take it, the hipbones and shoulder bones. With just the shoulder strap on, one can still slide out from under and get strangled.

The lap belt alone doesn't keep one's face from hitting the steering wheel or other parts of the car. Wearing seat belts is the law in most countries. There really isn't any reason not wear them aside from plain laziness. But imagine, that investment of a couple of seconds before you carry on to drive could save your life. Why not make that commitment to invest now?

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