The other day, I again heard someone say something that I’ve heard many people say over the years- “If I had been wearing a seatbelt, I’d have been killed! Not wearing a seatbelt allowed me to be thrown from the car, thus saving my life! The car was completely crushed!”- or words to that effect.
Is this something that is actually true? Do very many people get trapped in a car and then crushed to death because of their seatbelt? Come to think of it, I’ve never heard a first responder say this about someone in an accident- it always seems to come from the victim as a justification for not wearing seatbelts.
The reason you almost never hear this excuse from an actual first responder is because people who do not wear their seatbelt in a car accident of any real severity almost always die. Think about it—getting thrown clear means going straight through the windshield, which in an accident is going to turn into a million shattered knives. On top of that, even after you’re through the windshield, you’ve now got to absorb the energy of your 55 MPH+ movement with what remains of your delicate body.
The fact is that cars in accidents look completely crushed because they are explicitly designed to get completely crushed. Every rumple, ding, bend, and crunch in the post-accident car was energy absorbed by the car that would have otherwise gone right into your body. In fact, after a severe accident, even the seatbelts themselves are stretched significantly from taking away energy that otherwise would have injured the passengers. Cars get totaled by accidents because a crushed car is a car that absorbed hundreds of times the energy that would have outright killed the passengers.
Do seatbelts occasionally kill? Probably—airbags kill every now and then too. But if I’m in an accident and I have a choice between going through the windshield and getting rid of all of my kinetic energy with my body versus getting rid of it through my car that is designed to get rid of it safely, I’m taking my chances with the car every time.
Summery: Blew a tire at 60+ MPH on an exit ramp and rolled his truck 10+ times after going over the guardrail.
He’s the kind of kid that never wears a seat belt because “when my time comes it will come” type attitude.
If he HAD NOT been wearing his seat belt this time he would 100% be dead. Instead he has a massive concussion and a bunch of staples in his skull and spent less then a day in the hospital.
Prior to shoulder belts, lap belts probably have killed. My son was a rear/middle seat passenger in a car that hit a tree. Fortunately, he was shoulder and lap belted. Nevertheless, when he was thrown forward the lap belt caused numerous internal injuries. Speaking with the surgeon, it was his opinion that without the shoulder belt he would have been thrown forward so violently that his spine would have been severed. Shoulder belts were designed to prevent the upper body from being violently thron forward. All this said, lap belts could kill, but without them you wouldn’t be much better off.
You could absolutely be saved by not wearing your seatbelt. It falls under the “anything is possible” realm. The odds are so astronomically small in comparison to the survival rate associated with wearing them it is a pointless thing to contemplate. Only 1 person in my area (that I can remember) survived an ejection from a car and it made national news. He hit a bridge abutment at 100 mph and the car disintegrated.
In EMT school, they taught us the kind of injuries to expect from someone wearing a seat belt in a high-energy crash. Seat belts can and do really mess you up, but without them you can be ejected from a vehicle, which is nearly always fatal. Wear your seat belts, people!
Back when MA first enacted their mandatory seatbelt law (wiki says 1994 but I’m pretty sure it happened a decade earlier) my parents claimed to have known someone who drove off a bridge and drown because he couldn’t get his seatbelt off. This of course, was a story to illustrate the foolishness of the new law. But after my dad was minorly injured a few years later and wasn’t wearing a seat belt, he became convinced that wearing one was a good idea and encouraged us to too. The friend who drown was never heard about again.
Where I’m going with this is that I think my parents and their probably imaginary friend are not a unique thing. I’m certain that a lot of people who died because of wearing a belt, or survived not wearing one, were invented when seatbelt laws popped up. If NH ever decides to require adults wear their seatbelts, I’m sure I’ll suddenly know a lot more people with a friend who drowned while wearing a seatbelt and so on.
It’s possibly but very unlikely that wearing a seatbelt will end up in more serious injury.
I wrecked a car and the drivers seat was basically gone. I f I had been restrained in that position I’d be dead. Hoverer this was a freak incident. I always wear a belt now, the odds of that kind of thing happening again are unbelievably small compared to the odds of me getting into an accident where a belt will save me.
There is a type of serious to deadly injury that can be caused by using lap belts alone. The upper body can get doubled over violently with all of the energy directly to the lower abdomen. It can cause lower spine shearing and massive internal injuries and death. That is why lap belts alone are rare in newer vehicles even for the middle seat. Of course, without the lap belt the person would have been thrown and possibly been killed or severely injured anyway but lap belts alone are not nearly as safe as ones with a shoulder harness.
My paternal grandfather, who was reclusive and mentally strange, used to brag that he’d been thrown clear of a car in a wreck because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and that instead of being “trapped in the car” (which, as far as I know, was neither on fire nor underwater) he’d had the good fortune to land on his head. Nobody in the family was impressed with this line of thinking.
How about: the people who claim they were saved because they didn’t wear a seatbelt are more numerous than the people who say that they died because they didn’t wear a seatbelt.
My mother survived being ejected from a car in an accident that took place before most cars had seatbelts (hers did not). Supposedly the passenger compartment had suffered significant damage, but I do not know how extensive. That was a different era, though, when car design provided much less protection for the passenger compartment.
Before I was born, my dad’s brother was killed in a car crash. He was wearing a seatbelt. The other person in the car (I’m not sure who was driving) was not wearing one. He was thrown clear and lived. At least that’s what I was told.
I still think your chances are much better when wearing one than not. Tom makes a good point. That was long before safety features like airbags etc.
I don’t mean to pick on you or your family in particular (really) - especially as you acknowledge the utility of seatbelts as a safety feature, but I just wanted to say that all of these stories seem to sound exactly the same.