WHEN SAFETY BELTS AREN'T SAFE

By Edward M. Ricci, Esq.
Benjamin Kelley

FOREWORD

"Buckle up for Safety."

Probably every American who drives or rides in a car has heard the call to "buckle up" - not once but over and over again. Laws in a majority of states require seat belt use. In addition, federal and state safety officials, consumer groups. Physicians and companies that manufacture and sell cars loudly and repeatedly urge drivers and passengers to wear their belts. Drivers and passengers are saying to each other, "buckle up for safety."

Is anybody listening?

In fact, tens of millions of Americans are listening and they are heeding the call every day across the country. Belt use has soared in the past few years, from a low of about 10 percent to well above 50, 60 and even 70 percent in some areas. We have become a national of belt wearers. We are, increasingly, buckling up.

But what are we buckling up with?

In the vast majority of cars on the highways today, we are buckling up with deficient, defective, damaging or deteriorating belts. Yet the car companies, which have conspicuously joined the "buckle up" chorus, have done little or nothing to remedy this national hazard. And our federal safety officials do not seem to care.

The bottom line is that motorists need to buckle up, but they need safe, hazard free belts. As belt use soars, injuries caused or aggravated by belt soar with it.

It is tragic enough that car companies fail to build sufficient overall crashworthiness into their cars. But when they don not care enough even to provide optimum safety in seat belts, components that exist solely for safety purposes, it is a scandal. Today that scandal is exposing a large majority of Americans to horrendous injuries from the very system provided to protect them.
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INTRODUCTION

Car crashworthiness is a life and death concept. The widespread, decades-long failure of auto manufacturers to adhere to this concept has brought mortal injury or lifetime disability to millions upon millions of Americans. The flawed state of seat belt design and performance is one of the chief causes. Car crashes are entirely foreseeable and often unavoidable. But whether caused by bad weather, inexperienced driving, defective vehicle components or any other condition, the creases themselves do not in many cases need to produce deadly injuries. Frequently, when serious injuries do result, it is because the companies that manufactured the cars failed or refused to make those cars adequately crashworthy.

Safety belt performance plays a central role in the triad of crashworthiness: contain, maintain and restrain. The crashworthiness triad dictates that the car's design does the following in a crash:

Contain the occupants by providing doors, windows, sunroofs and other apertures that discourage ejection. IF such designs cannot be provided and the manufacturer nevertheless insists on marketing the car, it is obliged to at least warn the prospective buyer and all potential users about the vehicle's ejection hazards and their injurious or fatal consequences.

Maintain the integrity of the vehicles so they will not collapse, crush, rip open or otherwise deform in ways that violate the all-important "protective envelope" provided by the occupant compartment. The size of the envelope must, of course, be adequate in the first place. "Maintain" also applies to the integrity of fuel tanks and lines; defectively designed, they can spew deadly gas and fumes that produce raging, deadly post-crash blazes.

Restrain the occupants by preventing or minimizing their violent movement within the vehicle or from it, preventing or minimizing their risk of hitting damaging structures in the vehicle and making all interior structures as "forgiving," i.e. energy managing, as possible in the event of impact. Historically, seat belts have been the major component for accomplishing this crucially important piece of the crashworthiness triad.