PICTURE GALLERY

This picture was found on the cover of Traffic Safety Facts, a publication put out by NHTSA. No account was  given of this particular accident. It seems somewhat ironic that an organization which was pushing seatbelts  should have published this particular picture. Perhaps the implications did not occur to them. We are not told if  the occupants were wearing seatbelts or not. Do you  think it would have made any difference?

This is a picture of an actual,  fatal head on collision. That pile of scrap metal on the left used to be a Ford Focus. Notice the dashboard of the Chevy Tahoe lying on the ground next to the vehicle. They had to remove it to extract the occupants. The girl in the Ford was named Beverly Carstairs. She was 21 years old.

Here is another real, fatal head-on collision. A Dodge Ram pickup truck hit this Nissan Sentra head-on. It rode over the Sentra, crushing the front seat occupants to death. This is called override and is a category in the FARS data base. An eight year old girl in the back seat survived because she was not strapped into a child "safety seat". Had she been strapped into a "child safety seat", as NHTSA now wants states to require, she too would have been crushed to death.

                        This SUV ran into the back of a flatbed truck                                                                         So did this car

This is what happens in real, fatal roll-over accidents

Here are some more pictures of roll-over accidents:

The following picture shows the effect of a relatively low speed, side impact collision:

The driver of this car was more seriously injured because he was wearing a seatbelt. This is because
a) The seatbelt acts like an anvil, holding the victim in place and forcing him to accept the full force of the blow; and
b) The impact drives the victim against the narrow area of the belt, causing additional injuries from the belt irself.

The following stories speaks for themselves:

                                                    The following accident gives us some insight into the crush speed:

Here we have a case of a full sized Ford pick-up truck smashing into the back of a stationary pick-up truck at 40 miles per hour. We are told that the dashboard of the truck in the picture was driven back across the legs of the driver and up to, but not into, his body. This is interesting because, based on our analysis of the FARS data base, we concluded that the minimum crush speed for a head-on collision, that is, the speed at which the dashboard would have been driven all the way back to the back of the front seat, crushing the front  seat passengers  to death,  was 45 mph. Since this is a sturdier vehicle than most, it seems that our estimate may have been a little high. It seems clear, however, that if this truck had been travelling five miles per hour faster, the dashboard would have been driven into the driver's body and he would not have survived.

Here is the effect of a relatively low speed angle collision:

This was a relatively low speed collision yet the passenger was trapped in the vehicle by the crushed body and injured seriously enough to spend seven days in the  hospital.

If you think the single line about Tanya Rawson, and so many others, in our seatbelt victims file, is just something we made up, take a look:

This is the car in which little Tanya Rawson burned to death. Her mother could not get the her seatbelt open and had to watch her daughter burn to death. We hope that all those who want to force parents to strap their children into "child safety seats" will take a good look at this picture.

The person who sent us the picture on the left tells us that the only reason the driver survived was because she was not wearing a seatbelt and hence was able to get out of the way as the power pole slammed into the car. The center picture shows the result of a recent front end collision in France. Could the driver of the car on the right have survived if she had not been wearing a seatbelt? If she had seen the tree coming and had dived to the floor she might have survived.

                                                            Pretty much speaks for itseslf, doesn't it?

Here is another picture of a real fatal accident. Doesn't look much like the dummy tests, does it. This accident took place on February 10, 2006. The story says the driver was killed instantly but the passenger died in the hospital. Judging by the picture it was most likely the other way around. If the passenger was sitting in the right front seat, she would have been crushed to death by the impact of the truck, especially if she was wearing a seatbelt.  What killed the driver is not so clear. The story does not say if the vehicle occupants were wearing seatbelts which means they probably were. The Subaru would have been hurled sharply to the left by the impact which would have driven the lap belt into the waist of the driver, likely breaking her spleen. This can be fatal unless the victim can be transported to the hospital in time. Without the autopsy report giving the cause of death, we shall never know for sure. The roof of the Subaru was clearly cut off by the rescue squad to extract the victims.

          Here's some more:

                This is what happens to real cars in real fatal accidents.