I used to not wear seat belts until I was shown a safety video one day at work entitled “Room To Live”. The video featured a man telling you the stories of what happened to the people sitting in the seat that he was sitting in a wrecked car from the junk yard. In every case, the people died BECAUSE they were not wearing their seat belts. At the end of each story, the camera would pan back to show him sitting where they had sat and would say “As you can see, they had room to live”. The car is designed to protect you in a wreck, if you can only stay inside of it. I have worn my seat belts ever since.
I pretty much wore a seatbelt all the time after I bought my first car, an MG Midget, but it was cemented for me when I was getting my degree, doing clinical training in a hospital.
I was a young guy, and an an attractive young woman was brought to me in a wheelchair for an exam, seemingly unharmed except for her face.
Her lovely face had a sutured laceration that went from above her right eye on her forehead all the way down to her chin, and a sutured tranverse laceration that met up with the vertical laceration on her right cheekbone, and went diagonally across her face, across her upper lip, ending up on her left cheekbone near her left ear.
The horrible thing to me, still inexperienced, was the appearance of the sutured wounds. The skin around them was swollen, purplish/reddish and puffy, with what looked like great big black sutures going top to bottom and side to side.
I don’t recall, but I suspect I may have been gaping at her, and without even having to ask her, she said something like “I wasn’t even wearing a seatbelt...I was going slow, about 20 miles an hour and rear-ended a car. My face hit the steering wheel before I could react, and it did this.”
I always wondered if they were ever able to do anything about those lacerations that looked like they were going to leave huge white scars.
But after that, never drove again without a seatbelt.