|
WHEN SAFETY BELTS AREN'T SAFE By Edward M. Ricci, Esq. 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. 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. The properly designed seat belt has been recognized by physicians and independent safety engineers as the most effective active means of restraining occupants in vehicles to minimize their violent movements within or from crashing vehicles. It is "active" because it requires the active, repeated cooperating of the user who must put the belt on each time he or she gets in the car. In contrast, "passive" or automatic systems such as air bags, energy absorbing steering columns, laminated windshields, padded dashboards and most other auto safety features in the car require no occupant activation. And, despite the protracted and fierce opposition of car companies to providing standard equipment seat belts during the 1950s and 1960s, they have existed for many years. Visitors to the Wells Fargo Museum in San Francisco can see one of the earliest versions of a seat belt, a set of straps that stage coach passengers tied around their waists to prevent ejection during rocky cross-country journeys. In the East Coast, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum exhibits World War I-era plans that are equipped with belts intended to "restrain" pilots and passengers from falling from their craft during barrel roll maneuvers. Even before World War II, pioneering physicians and vehicle design experts were beginning to identify a crying need for seat belt restraints in passenger cars. As car sales and traffic climbed, so did the death and injury toll from crashes. Examining crashes and injuries, these medical and engineering experts soon saw patterns of trauma emerging that made it clear that by effectively restraining occupants from excessive or violent motion during the split-second moment of impact, serious injuries could be avoided or greatly minimized. One of the earliest safety advocates, a Detroit plastic surgeon named Claire L. Straith, devised a seat belts system and installed it in his own car in the early 1930s. Despite the urgings of Straith, Dr. Fletcher Woodward, Hugh DeHaven, Dr. Horace Campbell, Dr. William Haddon, Col. John Stapp and others, most U.S. car companies declined to offer standard equipment seat belts until ordered to do so, first by individual state legislatures in the mid-1960s and, finally, by the federal government under the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. Even then, the belt standards set under the Safety Act contained only minimum criteria that left broad design discretion to the manufacturers. For instance, the standards have failed to require any type of dynamic testing of seat belts in the vast majority of cars now on the highways. Meanwhile, at least one European company was forging ahead by providing seat belts in its cars, both in Europe and the Untied States, although not required by law. Volvo, the Swedish manufacturer whose new car marketing stressed safety and reliability rather than speed and cosmetics, proclaimed the value of seat belts during the 1950s on the basis of extensive car crash tests, laboratory work and field evaluation.1 By the late 1960s, as U.S. manufacturers were fighting federal proposals to require lap-shoulder design based on crash experience for the huge number of vehicles with belts that it sold in Sweden. Volvo's work helped to underscore two critically important points: Properly designed seat belts could make a major injury-reducing difference in crashes and poorly designed belts could result in decreased effectiveness and, in fact, could create, enhance or permit otherwise avoidable injuries. Today, more than 20 years after the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) required safety belts in motor vehicles, many car companies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) still have the public believe that "a belt is a belt," that every belt design, no matter how poor or hazardous, is as safe as any other. NHTSA's position is, "We can't tell people about this injury problem because if we did, they wouldn't wear the lap belts.":2 It apparently had not occurred to the agency that its duty was not to delude people into wearing unsafe belts but to force recall and correction of the hazardous lap-only designs, for which the agency has ample authority. The car companies steadfastly refuse to recall and correct the majority of their deficient belts. NHTSA has been acting to protect the companies rather than the motoring public. The burden of dealing with the bad-belt injury crisis has fallen on the tort system. People hurt by the car companies' failure to provide adequate belts in the first place find they must turn to the courts for redress because the companies and regulation have failed them. As court case after court case reveals, belt systems and designs differ vastly and alarmingly in their performance when the chips are down - that is, when a crash occurs and the belt wearer suddenly, crucially, needs the belt's benefits. In that split second, the manufacturer's failure to have equipped the vehicle with an adequate belt system can become the difference between life and death for the belt wearer who has, after all, done his or her part by "buckling up." BELTS - FOR BETTER OR WORSE How should a properly designed seat belt perform? What protection should its wearer expect? The answer is found in the nature of the car crash itself. In he car's impact with a fixed object or another vehicle, the so-called "first collision," the occupant continues to move after the car itself has decelerated. The movement will only be slowed or arrested when the occupant's body meets an opposing structure in the "second collision." If that structure is hostile, e.g. a rigid metal roof rail, jagged windshield glass or the hard surface of a pavement outside the car, the results can be devastating. If the structure if protective, that is, if it spreads the crash forces across the occupants' body, diverts them from body areas especially vulnerable to life-threatening injuries and yields sufficiently to the body's impact, injuries can be prevented or substantially minimized. The role of a properly designed seat belt system is to provide just that kind of protection in the "second collision" because, when worn, it is the first structure met by the violently moving occupant's body. As stated by the principal research scientist at General Motors (but routinely violated by that company in many of its belt designs): "A snug-fitting lap-shoulder belt ties the occupant directly to the passenger compartment and allows that occupant to 'ride down' the crash," thus eliminating "the more severe occupant-to-interior 'second collisions,' provided the belts are themselves fairly tight." And, "Belts are also designed to distribute restraining loads over strong skeletal structures, including the shoulder, rib cage, and pelvis, to optimize protection during deceleration." But a belt that is not properly designed, a former Ford engineer warned as early as 1970, "may itself contribute to injury in specific circumstances."4 And a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) report cautioned as early as 1969 that a belt "should perform in a manner which applies restraint forces to appropriate areas of the anatomy and which results in minimal occupant injury, with considerations of skeletal, internal organ and soft-tissue damage, including disfigurement."15 How well have the warnings been heeded by car manufacturers? How closely are belts meeting even the basic criteria suggested by GM's own principal research scientist and the SAE? The answers are found in the real-world belt systems that Americans are being urged or required to "buckle up" in most cars on the highways today. BELT BY BELT: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Rear lap belts In July 1986 the public was jolted by revelations that rear lap belts, the kind installed in almost every car sold in America prior to 1990, represented a deadly menace in very common crashes, especially to children. The news came in the form of a study, "Performance of Lap Belts in 26 Frontal Crashes," published by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal government's safety "watchdog." However, the news came as no surprise to the auto manufacturers. For years they had been told repeatedly in medical and engineering literature that lap-only belts would not only permit needless injuries in some crashes, but also would cause injuries and that properly designed lap-shoulder belts would eliminate these hazards. Updating those warnings, NTSB concluded: "Lap belts may induce injury, ranging in severity from minor to fatal, to the head; spine; abdomen; intra-abdominal viscera, connecting tissue, and blood vessels; and intra-thoracic viscera, connecting tissue, and blood vessels. Such injuries may occur singly or in combination."6 As NTSB noted, the belts promote head injury by allowing the upper torso to swing forward, and abdominal and spinal cord injury by overloading the lower torso with crash forces. Rear-belt use has increased since 1986; predictably and tragically, injuries have also climbed. Even NHTSA, which has failed to recall such belts or effectively promote the retrofitting of rear lap-shoulder belts, has admitted to Congress that as many as 6,000 deaths and injuries per year could be prevented by the replacement of lap-only rear belts with lap-shoulder belts. One reason for the injury proliferation is that the lap belts often ride over the pelvis in crashes. By doing so, they violate a federal motor vehicle standard requiring the belt to "remain on the pelvis" in crashes. 7 This further increases the likelihood of severe abdominal and spinal cord trauma, especially to small children. Their delicate muscular and skeletal structures, coupled with the frequency of families putting the kids in the back seat, mean they are especially exposed to rear lap belt damage. Slack inducing "tension relievers" An auto manufacturer can choose to install a properly fitting, comfortable, safe lap-shoulder belt for drivers and passengers or it can choose instead of provide an ill fitting, uncomfortable, dangerous belt and then attempt to offset the poor design with a so-called "tension reliever" that makes the belt more tolerable to wear but even more dangerous in a crash. Faced with federal standards requiring front seat outboard lap-shoulder belts in new cars starting in the early 1970s, most U.S. manufacturers took the second choice. Their lap-shoulder belts generally were so poorly designed that they squeezed the wearer's body uncomfortably, which discouraged use, and were routed across the necks and faces of shorter wearers that created or increased injury risks in crashes. Rather than redesigning the belts to make them safe and comfortable, the companies instead equipped them with a "tension relieving" device known as a "windowshade." This is a device that allows the wearer to put up to several inches of slack in the belt by giving it a tug. The slack is supposed to solve the tight fit and dangerous routing problems, or at least cover them up. Instead it makes them much worse. A loose belt is a grave hazard in a crash. According to NHTSA tests, even an inch of slack can substantially raise head injury force levels, and a few inches can largely eliminate the belt's effectiveness.8 Further, a slack belt can promote or allow ejection or severe submarining. The "windowshade" promotes slack both by encouraging the belt wearer to make the belt loose and by allowing slackness _ sometimes many inches of it _ to creep into the belt without the wearer's knowledge. In June of 1979 a NHTSA contractor, completing an exhaustive analysis of belt design problems, warned that windowshades "should not be employed" because they "often allow excessive and dangerous slack in the shoulder beltÖ." NHTSA also indicated that removal of such devices would save not only lives but also money, since the resulting cost of belts to car buyers would be less.9 But manufacturers have ignored the warning. In 1988 the NTSB repeated the warning and, referring to data, indicated that "increasing slack in a windowshade equipped lap-shoulder belt increases the chance of serious or fatal head injuries."10 It urged curtailment of such devices. Although manufacturers appear to have begun phasing the devices out during the 1990 and 1991 model years, they refuse to deactivate them in cars already on the highways, thus leaving at risk hundreds of millions of American motorists. Door-mounted belts When a car door unintentionally opens, an occupant's needs for a belt is especially urgent. Only a well-designed belt system will restrain the user from ejection through an open door. But if the belt opens with the door, it is as if the wearer never had a belt on in the first place! This is just what can happen with a commonly offered version of "automatic" seat belts, the ones that are supposed to buckle themselves up with no help from the user. Because the belts are anchored to the door, they pull open if the door opens in a crash, inviting ejection of the occupant, which is a leading cause of catastrophic injury in rollover and other crashes. In late 1990 a Main police officer died from such an ejection. The door of his GM-made patrol car opened in a side impact with a telephone pole and the door-anchored "automatic" belt system became ineffective. To prevent additional tragedies, Main has retrofitted manual belts into all its police cars.11 Yet car companies continue to equip their new cards with door-mounted belt designs while doing nothing to correct the ones already on the highways or warn their owners about the ejection hazard. Shoulder-only belts For a long time a shoulder belt without a lap belt has been widely recognized as an extremely hazardous design. "In one study it was found that the upper torso belt (alone) can produce a more serious injury than the lap belt...this type of strap can cause severe injuries to internal organs or the neck (when the wearer slides out of the belt). Even a lap strap alone was considered preferable..."12 So wrote a leading biomechanics expert in 1970. The hazards of shoulder-only belt systems have prompted manufacturers and governments in Europe and Australia to forbid the use of this design in any car. Yet as recently as 1990 such belts were being sold in the U.S. market and are still permitted under NHTSA safety standards. The leading shoulder-only belt design is one developed by Volkswagen during the 1970s, when the German manufacturer was attempting to stop then-pending U.S. requirements for air bags in future new cards. VW claimed that its shoulder-only "automatic" belt would be an acceptable substitute for the air bag. However, the shoulder-only "automatic" belt compounds the hazards because it is mounted to the car door. It has turned out to be a nightmare for occupants who have suffered the injuries it so needlessly causes. The design is also found on recent model Hyundai and other vehicles; variations of it, popular with some U.S. and Japanese manufacturers, include an "automatic" shoulder belt and manual lap belt. Car-mounted, motorized "automatic" shoulder belts are also a hazard; when the door opens, it triggers the motor to remove the belt from the occupant. Years ago, NHTSA instituted a requirement still in effect today that all shoulder portions of separate lap-shoulder belt assemblies were to be labeled with a warning that "the shoulder belt is not to be used without a lap belt."13 Somehow NHTSA and the car companies have conveniently ignored the urgent need for this warning to be prominently displayed on all so-called "automatic" shoulder-only belt systems. It is an omission that will continue to inexcusably endanger motorists in crashes until these systems disappear or are removed from highways. Poorly placed anchorages A number of car models popular in the United States are equipped with three-point lap-shoulder belts. The upper anchorage locations ensure a poor, dangerous fit for many users, including children and small adults. A few car companies have attempted to correct these problems by providing newer models with adjustable shoulder belt anchorages. This permits the shoulder belt to be positioned in a more favorable and safe relationship to the upper torso, such as across the chest rather than across the neck, which ensures adequate protection in a crash. Yet despite the simplicity and low cost of adjustable anchorages, they are found on very few cars. "Convenience" hazards: In an effort to meet federal standards requiring belt accessibility, some manufactures have ignored safety. For example, to keep rear lap-only belts from slipping behind the seat of many Escort models, Fort Motor Company attached the belt buckle to the seat by an elastic "strap retainer." Tragically, the "strap retainer" applied forces that pulled the belt off the wearer's pelvis, meaning that in a crash, it becomes a lethal threat to abdominal organs and the spinal cord. In Garrett v. Ford, a U.S. District Court jury in Baltimore found the Escort belt to be defective both because of the "strap retainer" and because, unlike European Escorts, it provided no shoulder belt in the rear seat.14 Excessive Playout A belt that is loose is a belt that does not provide adequate protection. In normal use, the belt must be reasonably sung in a crash: it must remain tight across the chest and pelvis. Although some "give" in the belt webbing is necessary to attenuate the crash forces, too much slack will permit excessive forward motion of the wearer. Belt systems can have too much slack for a number of reasons. These include designs that delay the lockup of the belt retractor mechanism. They also include unacceptably high amounts of spool-out, i.e. belt playout as the webbing tightens around the retractor. And of course, they include the "windowshade" slack-inducing designs described above. A long-available but rarely used devise for offsetting these deficiencies is the pre-tensioner. A pre-tensioner is a device for tightening the belt around the wearer when a crash is sensed. Impressive as this simple technology has proven to be in reducing crash injuries, it is available only on a few high-priced new cars. Inertial unlatching More than 100 million cars in use in the United States have seat belts with release buttons on the front of the buckles. Depending on their design, these belts are prone to release in crashes, especially side impacts, rollovers and other impacts with substantial rotational forces. The release can occur when the rear face of the buckle is impacted by a solid part of the user's body (such as the pelvic or hip bone) or by a child restraint that the belt is supposed to hold in place. Under the resulting blow the hardware acts as if the release button on the buckle had been activated. The government has refused to investigate this "inertial unlatching' defect, despite mounting complaints from motorists and reports of crash injuries caused by it. Still unexplained are crash tests by industry and government agencies in which such belts opened despite careful preparations to ensure that they were initially secured around the test dummies. Because of concern over the problems in the 1970s, the Australian government took steps to eliminate the offending belt buckle designs from the marketplace. Federal safety regulations have failed to keep unsafe seat belt systems off the market. As a result, the vast majority of cars driven by Americans today are equipped with the kinds of inadequate, hazardous, belts discussed here. Current federal regulatory policy effectively shields the manufacturers of these defective seat belt systems from tougher standards and recalls of defective belts. The federal government is not living up to its statutory mandate to adopt effective belt standards for new vehicles and recall unsafe belts in older vehicles. The original intent of the FMVSS for seat belts have been perverted. It is both tragic and perversely ironic that, as belt use increases, needless and fatal injuries from bad belts are increasing proportionately. When belt usage in the United States was minimal, defects inherent in restraint systems were not apparent. Now, seat belt usage laws and "buckle up" campaigns have exposed a frightening potential for injury and death from these unsafe "safety" belts. Because of the anti-consumer attitude of both federal regulators and the auto industry in general, automobile occupants injured or killed as a result of unsafe seat belts have little recourse other than the tort system. In pursuing their rightful claims for safe seat belts they will continue to bring pressure on errant auto manufacturers and, hopefully, NHTSA to honor their responsibilities to provide restrain systems that are safe and to replace those that are not. "Buckle up" is a goal we can all applaud. However, it will continue to be a bittersweet and pain-tinged refrain as long as unsafe belts are used on America's highways. ENDNOTES |
Articles
Ricci~Leopold, P.A.
2925 PGA Boulevard, Suite 200
Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410
(561) 684-6500 - Telephone
(800) 699-1914 - Toll Free
(561) 697-2383 - Fax
Email us - Map/Directions
