These days, roughly 87% of people in the U.S. wear their seatbelts when they drive. Mostly because they don't want to get a ticket and pay a rediculous fine. If you were to ask people, chances are they would say becuase seatbelts save lives. But is this really true?
After issuing recalls at least once a week this year and now having to pay billions of dollars to fix their vehicles, GM is looking at improving the safety of their cars by offering a free option to some of their 2015 vehicles. If you want, GM will put in a device that will prevent drivers from shifting the car into drive if they're not buckled up. So in case the ignition slips in the new vehicles, at least you'll be buckled up when you crash.
Back in the 70's, the Government mandated something like this on all cars. The only difference was that the engine wouldn't even start unless passengers were buckled. This created an outrage and the device was no longer mandated.
But this was back in the 70's, before airbags even existed. Today, a modern car has around 8-11 airbags in the car. It's almost like driving with a bouncy house inside. Most of the time seatbelts do save people's lives during a crash. Once in a while, a person may be burned because their seatbelt failed to unbuckle, but seatbelts have saved more people than they killed.
But on to the real question. Why can't people just figure out how to drive so they don't get into accidents? Majority of people either aren't watching the road, swerving to hit an animal in the road, or just drive too slowly. If people took some time to drive their cars at a racetrack, they will be the safest drivers around. Since race car drivers drive at around 200 mph during a race, they need to be even safer than regualr drivers. There are many race tracks that allow the public to take their cars and drive it around for a day. If everyone did that, we would save many more lives than seatbelts do.
