undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbumbada4y ago0 comments

There is nothing inherently safer about using seatbelts per se.

In fact seatbelts can kill you. I have a friend that went out with his has car and a friend 20 years ago, they did drink too much and had an accident. He was expelled by the acceleration the car had(because he used no seatbelt) while his friend burned alive inside the car.

What makes seatbelts generally safer is that it is a single point of failure, you leave only one possibility for the position of occupants, so you could put a team of engineers working around this single point of failure and develop solutions for that, like now that you know all your occupants remain inside you can make the deposit to absorb impacts, or you can use airbags, that are useless or even dangerous without using seatbelts.

Without seatbelts , there is almost infinite possibilities and combinations of failure, and you can not design against that.

But a solo enthusiast in India has not this luxury.

0 comments

meheleventyone4y ago

> There is nothing inherently safer about using seatbelts per se. In fact seatbelts can kill you. I have a friend that went out with his has car and a friend 20 years ago, they did drink too much and had an accident. He was expelled by the acceleration the car had(because he used no seatbelt) while his friend burned alive inside the car.

When assessing safety we can’t argue from anecdote like this. Getting ejected from a car is almost always fatal. Accidents involving fire are pretty rare. Your anecdote is so far from a norm as to be a ridiculous example to assess the safety of seat belts.

mekkkkkk4y ago

Making the "thrown clear" argument in 2021 is bold if nothing else. Showing that there are circumstances where a seatbelt would be detrimental to safety does not disprove their overall safety. You could find examples of any safety apparatus being more dangerous in some select situations. People are choked by their helmet straps. Safety garments gets sucked into machinery. It's just the law of large numbers.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse