We’re required to have a four-hour annual defensive driving refresher. For newbies at work it’s eight hours.
This year we had a guest speaker we’ve had in the past, a trauma nurse from Trauma Nurses Talk Tough. This is what I remember from earlier this Spring when our speaker (a trauma nurse with 30 years of ER trauma care) discussed using seatbelts:
[ul]
[li]Always wear a seatbelt, regardless of speed. And wear it properly.[/li][li]Practically all accidents in excess of 20-25 mph without wearing a seatbelt are either fatal, or you will suffer brain damage (almost always irreversible). She showed us this video and said they were going 25 mph. In a vehicle, this would have been fatal for practically everyone in it not wearing seatbelts.[/li][li]Even a head-on at 25 mph with no seatbelts but airbags deployed are often fatal.[/li][li]Not wearing a seatbelt assuming you will be “thrown clear” in an accident does not take into account you need an open door or window in order to be thrown clear. You are never thrown clear through a windshield in a modern vehicle anymore. If the windshield does break, your body stops at your shoulders; your head may not.[/li][li]Take a pop can and drop a pebble into it. Now shake it. The sound you hear is your body coming apart inside a vehicle when you don’t wear a seatbelt when the vehicle rolls, spins, flips or any combination thereof.[/li][li]Sitting in the front seat with the back of the seat tilted back and wearing a seatbelt greatly increases your chances of submarining during a collision and enduring severe neck tramau, or even decapitation.[/li][/ul]
You really can’t take out the entire windshield, they’re glued in with nearly an inch of urethane and automotive urethane has over 1000psi tensile strength. You’re gonna get a hole in the glass before knocking the entire thing out.
This is what happens when something makes a hole in a windshield. That was a deer, google has more images but most are gruesome. It wouldn’t be a neat human shaped hole like you see in cartoons, but a person being shot out from inside would make a similar hole.
People do survive being ejected sometimes, but the windshield isn’t made to make it any safer for them. I still argue the opposite, it’s probably worse than a side window (of course no one is ejected out of side windows).
To save any other curious people all of the Googling I just did: Everyone involved in this survived with only minor injuries. One of the spectators suffered a concussion as well. It was the Prince George Sandblast, which used to be a yearly event featuring people biking/skiing/snowboarding down a big sandy hill, but got canceled after this for liability reasons.
(I’m not trying to make a point about safety or seatbelts or anything; I was just very curious when I saw the video whether anyone had died, or what.)
Human vs windshield: we were called to a scene where a BMW had a head on collision with a station wagon on the freeway (station wagon got on the freeway off ramp and was going the wrong direction). Impact was approximately 130 mph (BMW at 80, Station Wagon at 50).
Both parties were deceased, and the guy in the BMW was not wearing a seatbelt.
Here’s what I learned from that.
A body travelling at 130MPH will not make completely through a windshield.
A body travelling at 130MPH will make it partially through a windshield.
After impacting a windshield at 130MPH, a head will eject its contents onto the hood of a BMW.
Our medical examiner will not accept a body with the windshield attached.
Some BMW’s have rolled boron roll cages.
Nothing in our arsenal can cut rolled boron
Our medical examiner will accept bodies in separate pieces
What a mess.
Nitpick: unless the masses/speeds of the vehicles are significantly different, you can’t simply combine the two vehicle speeds that way.
Two cars of equal mass going 50mph before a head-on collision will have pretty much the exact same impact to the driver as a single car going 50 mph into a brick wall. They don’t add to 100mph.
In all the years I have spent as a cop and as an EMT, and all the crashes that I rolled up on as a good samaritan, I have never unbuckled a dead body from a wrecked car. I’ve pulled out a bunch of unbuckled dead bodies, though.
I have taken probably hundreds of accident reports in a past job. I can say that most of the fatalities that I have seen that were wearing their seat belt were hit head on by a much larger vehicle, or perhaps had another vehicle/part of vehicle/other object enter the passenger compartment…seat belts are useless in either scenario.
If I heard the narrative ‘Vehicle 1 overturned and Driver 1 was ejected,’ I could almost count on it being a fatality.
One thing I am going to do when my son turns 15 is have him read accident reports every day until he figures out the common thread connecting 90% of fatalities: http://www.mshp.dps.mo.gov/HP68/search.jsp
I was in a pretty bad accident a few years ago - a car t-boned me at 70mph, just forward of the passenger compartment. My seatbelt left me quite bruised, the ER staff was worried about abdominal bleeding, and for several weeks afterward, my Dr. thought I might have a broken collarbone until some x-rays were taken. My left shoulder still bothers me sometimes.
But if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt, I’d have bounced around the cabin like a super-ball until I resembled a well tenderized steak.
I never seem to hear of it so I thought there probably wasn’t any data on it and it would be irrelevant, but actually there is data. According to this (google pdf preview), around 17% (it says half of 35%) of vehicle fatalities are side ejections. Wow, that’s a lot, probably more than windshields.
That’s certainly more that I would have guessed as well. I suppose that just about anytime a vehicle rolls, there’s a decent chance of an unbelted passenger being ejected out of a side window.
I had a friend in high school who was killed in an accident because he was wearing his seatbelt. His spleen was ruptured by the seatbelt and he bled out. Of course, given all of the other variables of the accident, who knows what the outcome would have been without the seatbelt.
years ago a work acquaintance lost his spouse in an accident. His son was driving and slid on ice and hit a tree. He walked away and his mother who was not wearing one, did not. It was a minor accident as accidents go but the physical trauma was substantial.
I myself have hit a parked car at 65 mph. this was before airbags and the seatbelt made it a walk-away event. Before anyone asks, I was looking in the rear view mirror wondering what happened to all the traffic behind me and all the traffic in front of me stopped. I did not see the brake lights in my peripheral vision.
ok as an ASE auto tec we get reports not seen by the public. at first the auto companies didn’t even want to install belt saying it was a bad idea. only after being threatened by nhtsa about mandating airbags did they agree and had them installed. only .10 of 1 per of any crash ends up with the person being thrown from the car and less that .5 per of them are thrown through the windshield. and by the way the windshield is safety glass and does not shatter and is almost impossible to cut you from the actual glass. i was also i first responder for almost 5 years and i have seen deaths were the seat belt was directly reasonable for them. one of witch was a man that had his neck sliced open from the belt. and as far as going through the windshield lets look at physics. if you were hit head on hard enough to be thrown though the windshield the force of you hitting the seat belt ’ at 30 times the force of the impact’ would kill you anyway and most likely crush you chest. do they save lives yes do they take lives yes but why is it not our choice if we want to or not. its just a little more freedom striped away and given to people that couldn’t care less about you. just remember people the more we let them take the more they are going to take until you have none
Ah, the striped freedom. Truly the rarest of all freedoms, and a wonder to behold in its natural habitat.
That “0.1 of 1 per cent” statistic is nonsense, needless to say. 15% of unbelted occupants are totally ejected in rollovers, versus 0.03% of belted occupants.
But only 2% of accidents involve rollovers. So 15% of 2% is only .3%. Nevertheless, everyone should buckle up. It’s really a no brainer. Being tossed around the inside of a vehicle is no picnic.
