The reason the three-point seatbelt is so widely adopted is actually because Volvo opened up the patent so that any car manufacturer could use it in their design.
They decided that the invention was so significant, it had more value as a free life saving tool than something to profit from. Nils Bohlin, inventor of the three-point seatbelt, received a gold medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science in and, in , was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. Bohlin, a former aviation engineer at Saab who worked on ejector seats, knew an effective belt must absorb force across the body yet be so easy to use even a child could buckle up. His ingenious solution took the form of a combined lap belt with a diagonal belt across the chest.
That design meant the belt would remain in place and not shift under a load. According to the latest figures released as part of celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the invention of the three-point seatbelt, it has saved a million lives across the world and prevented even more serious injuries. Reducing your chance of injury or death by at least 50 percent in the event of a collision, it remains the most successful contribution to safety in the history of motoring.
Seat belts became compulsory in the UK , and since then they have saved between 35, and 50, lives. Every car manufactured today uses three-point seat belts The man who saved a million lives Nils Bohlin, inventor of the three-point seatbelt, received a gold medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science in and, in , was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. Automatic belt systems generally offer inferior occupant crash protection.
In such a scenario, the occupant may be thrown from the vehicle and suffer greater injury or death. Because many automatic belt system designs compliant with the US passive-restraint mandate did not meet the safety performance requirements of Canada —which were not weakened to accommodate automatic belts—vehicle models which had been eligible for easy importation in either direction across the US-Canada border when equipped with manual belts became ineligible for importation in either direction once the U.
Two particular models included the Dodge Spirit and Plymouth Acclaim. Automatic belt systems also present several operational disadvantages. Motorists who would normally wear seat belts must still fasten the manual lap belt, thus rendering redundant the automation of the shoulder belt. Those who do not fasten the lap belt wind up inadequately protected only by the shoulder belt; in a crash without a lap belt such a vehicle occupant is likely to "submarine" be thrown forward under the shoulder belt and be seriously injured.
Vehicle owners tend to disconnect the motorized or door-affixed shoulder belt to relieve the nuisance of entering and exiting the vehicle, leaving only a lap belt for crash protection. Starting in and ending in , the United States conducted a research project on seat belt effectiveness on a total of 40, vehicle occupants using car accident reports collected during that time. A study as part of this program used data taken from 15, tow-away accidents that involved only car models made between and The study also concluded that the effectiveness of the safety belt did not differ with size of car.
The NCAP is a government program that evaluates vehicle safety designs and sets standards for foreign and domestic automobile companies. The agency developed a rating system and requires access to safety test results. Research and development efforts are ongoing to improve the safety performance of vehicle seatbelts.
Some experimental designs include:. In as a package , Ford offered lap only seat belts in the rear seats as an option within the Lifeguard safety package. In , Volvo started to install lap belts in the rear seats. In , Volvo upgraded the rear seat belts to a three-point belt.
Auto Safety
In crashes, unbelted rear passengers increase the risk of belted front seat occupants' death by nearly five times. As with adult drivers and passengers, the advent of seat belts was accompanied by calls for their use by child occupants, including legislation requiring such use. Generally children using adult seat belts suffer significantly lower injury risk when compared to non-buckled children. The UK extended compulsory seatbelt wearing to child passengers under the age of 14 in There is also research suggesting that children in inappropriate restraints are at significantly increased risk of head injury, [69] one of the authors of this research said, "The early graduation of kids into adult lap and shoulder belts is a leading cause of child-occupant injuries and deaths.
As a result of such findings, many jurisdictions now advocate or require child passengers to use specially designed child restraints. Such systems include separate child-sized seats with their own restraints and booster cushions for children using adult restraints.
9 Standard Features That Make Cars Safer
In some jurisdictions children below a certain size are forbidden to travel in front car seats. In Europe, the US, and some other parts of the world, most modern cars include a seat-belt reminder light for the driver and some also include a reminder for the passenger, when present, activated by a pressure sensor under the passenger seat. Some cars will intermittently flash the reminder light and sound the chime until the driver and sometimes the front passenger, if present fasten their seatbelts. Two specifications define the standard of seat belt reminder: UN Regulation 16, Section 8.
This mandate applied to passenger cars built after August , i.
The specifications required the system to permit the car to be started only if the belt of an occupied seat were fastened after the occupant sat down, so pre-buckling the belts would not defeat the system. In , Congress acted to prohibit NHTSA from requiring or permitting a system that prevents a vehicle from starting or operating with an unbelted occupant, or that gives an audible warning of an unfastened belt for more than 8 seconds after the ignition is turned on. In response to the Congressional action, NHTSA once again amended FMVSS , requiring vehicles to come with a seat belt reminder system that gives an audible signal for 4 to 8 seconds and a warning light for at least 60 seconds after the ignition is turned on if the driver's seat belt is not fastened.
A History of Seat Belts - Defensive Driving
In the mids, an insurance company from Sweden called Folksam worked with Saab and Ford to determine the requirements for the most efficient seat belt reminder. One characteristic of the optimal SBR, according to the research, is that the audible warning becomes increasingly penetrating the longer the seat belt remains unfastened. Starting with the model year, some Chevrolet cars will refuse to start for 20 seconds if the driver is unbuckled and the car is in "teen driver" mode. A similar feature was previously available on some General Motors fleet cars.
Observational studies of car crash morbidity and mortality, [83] [84] [85] experiments using both crash test dummies and human cadavers indicate that wearing seat belts greatly reduces the risk of death and injury in the majority of car crashes. This has led many countries to adopt mandatory seat belt wearing laws.
It is generally accepted that, in comparing like-for-like accidents, a vehicle occupant not wearing a properly fitted seat belt has a significantly and substantially higher chance of death and serious injury. One large observation studying using US data showed that the odds ratio of crash death is 0. The effects of seat belt laws are disputed by those who observe that their passage did not reduce road fatalities. There was also concern that instead of legislating for a general protection standard for vehicle occupants, laws that required a particular technical approach would rapidly become dated as motor manufacturers would tool up for a particular standard which could not easily be changed.
For example, in there were competing designs for lap and three-point seat belts, rapidly tilting seats, and airbags being developed. But as countries started to mandate seat belt restraints the global auto industry invested in the tooling and standardized exclusively on seat belts, and ignored other restraint designs such as air bags for several decades [88].
As of , seat belt laws can be divided into two categories: primary and secondary. A primary seat belt law allows an officer to issue a citation for lack of seatbelt use without any other citation, whereas a secondary seat belt law allows an officer to issue a seat belt citation only in the presence of a different violation. New Hampshire lacks both a primary and secondary seat belt law. Some have proposed that the number of deaths was influenced by the development of risk compensation , which says that drivers adjust their behavior in response to the increased sense of personal safety wearing a seat belt provides.
In one trial subjects were asked to drive go-karts around a track under various conditions. It was found that subjects who started driving unbelted drove consistently faster when subsequently belted. According to the analysis, seatbelts decreased fatalities by 1. The study controlled for endogenous motivations of seat belt use, because that creates an artificial correlation between seat belt use and fatalities, leading to the conclusion that seatbelts cause fatalities. For example, drivers in high risk areas are more likely to use seat belts, and are more likely to be in accidents, creating a non-causal correlation between seatbelt use and mortality.
After accounting for the endogeneity of seatbelt usage, Cohen and Einav found no evidence that the risk compensation effect makes seatbelt wearing drivers more dangerous, a finding at variance with other research. Other statistical analyses have included adjustments for factors such as increased traffic and age, and based on these adjustments, which results in a reduction of morbidity and mortality due to seat belt use.
Pros [94] [95] [96] and cons [97] [98] [99] had been alleged about the use of seatbelts in school buses. School buses which are much bigger in size than the average vehicle allow for the mass transportation of students from place to place. Although school buses are considered safe for mass transit of students this will not guarantee that the students will be injury free if an impact were to occur.
Seatbelts in buses are sometimes believed to make recovering from a roll or tip harder for students and staff as they could be easily trapped in their own safety belt. In the European Union, all new long distance buses and coaches must be fitted with seat belts. These must comply with Australian Design Rule 68, which requires the seat belt, seat and seat anchorage to withstand 20 g deceleration and an impact by an unrestrained occupant to the rear. In the United States, NHTSA has now required lap-shoulder seat belts in new "over-the-road" buses includes most coaches starting in The use of seatbelts in trains has been investigated.