Motor vehicle seatbelt use provides highly effective protection in frontal collisions for impacts at angles up to 30 degrees off-center (i.e. between 11 and 1 o’clock). All states have laws requiring their use for front seat passengers, as they have been shown to reduce moderate to severe injuries by 50%. However, a seatbelt is less effective when the vehicle is hit in the rear or side and sometimes their locking devices malfunction or the anchorage gives way. Car accidents where the occupants are not wearing their seatbelt often lead to the passengers striking the interior of the vehicle, or being ejected. Our engineers can perform biomechanical simulations and injury analysis [1] to determine whether seatbelt use could have prevented injury or ejection in a particular accident.
Special consideration need to be made for proper restraint of small children: A seatbelt should always be used in conjunction with rear facing infant seats (for infants up to 22 lbs), child seats (for ages 1 to 4, weighing up to 40 lbs) and booster seats for children between 4 and 8 (up to 80 lbs).