DRIVEN TO DRIVE

PART 2 – Airbags Are Not a Substitute for Seatbelts

In the event of a crash, a seatbelt will only restrain a person’s torso. The arms and legs will flail about and so will the person’s head. The head is important.  It also happens to be the heaviest part of the body and this is a problem because while the seatbelt holds back the body, the head wants to keep on going forward. This is where the airbag comes to the rescue. Airbags are designed to be fully inflated just before the head reaches it. To do its work, it must inflate fast – less than 1/100 of a second, which means that the surface of the bag is travelling at about 300 km/h during the inflation period. If a seat belt is not worn, the person’s face will meet the airbag as it is still inflating and being hit in the face by an airbag travelling at 300 km/h is no laughing matter. Remember, an airbag is an SRS – a Supplemental Restraint System. It’s not a stand-alone system. It will only work effectively if a seat belt is being worn.

People who rationalise their decision to not wear a seatbelt tend to use one of the following arguments –

• They claim that if they were in a crash and the vehicle caught fire for example, the seatbelt would restrict their escape. It probably would, but just how likely are they to escape from a fiery crash after they have been rendered unconscious or killed as a result of not wearing a seatbelt in the first place?
• They claim to be such good drivers they do not require a seatbelt. How good a driver they are is not a factor. Seatbelts protect all drivers – good and bad – against accidents caused not only by themselves, but by others. Incidentally, in accidents involving two or more vehicles, those who were not at fault often receive the greater personal injury.
• They argue that they would rather be thrown from the vehicle. To be thrown from a vehicle usually means having to go through a very hard barrier – a window. In a head-on crash, unsecured people go through the front windshield while in a roll over, they go through the side windows. Those who think they can survive such an incident are generally influenced by the media that tends to report only the ‘miraculous survival’ occurrences. What the same media often fails to report is, how many accidents occur where people are thrown from a vehicle and did not survive.  Just to make the point perfectly clear, after such an accident, it is not uncommon for police dogs to be called upon to search for missing body parts.
• They claim that they would rather be dead than maimed for life. What happens in the case of a minor accident where a seatbelt would have prevented any injury at all? In this case, the absence of the belt may very well result in them sustaining the very injury they had hoped to avoid.
• They claim that once they own a vehicle equipped with airbags, there is no need to wear seat belts. This is not true. Airbags reduce the amount of incidental head and neck injury after the seatbelt has done its job. It is not uncommon for the neck to stretch to twice its normal length in a violent impact. This causes all kinds of neck problems, even including trauma to the spinal cord. Airbags help reduce this form of injury but can only do so if a person is wearing a seatbelt.

Some people believe that there is no need to wear seatbelts while travelling in the backseat because the risk of injury is less. The laws of physics do not change between the front seats of the vehicle and the rear seats. The confusion arises because there is usually less injury sustained to passengers in the rear seat. This is because they are protected by distance from a front-end crash. In a more severe crash, if a rear seat passenger is not wearing seatbelt, it only means that they will go through the front windshield about 1/20th of a second later than if they had been sitting in the front seat.

One last note – for some unknown reason a remarkable number of people do not feel compelled to wear seat belts while riding in a taxicab. There is nothing magical about taxicabs.

Happily, people are slowly beginning to realise the sense in all this and are starting to use their seatbelts more often – but learning new habits is a slow process. Unfortunately, today someone died because they were not wearing a seatbelt. Tomorrow, someone else will die.

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