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Calling them safe is an abstraction that simplifies the conversation. Seat belts are meant to keep you alive at all costs. Often they're very damaging. But calling them unsafe muddies the conversation.


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Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

We're not talking about other things. We're talking about seatbelts.

Seatbelts are risk mitigation, but I guess you still wouldn't be happy if someone crashed their car into yours.

This is more like "seat belts make car accidents safer for passengers, and so we should move towards using them where possible."

"Seat belts make drivers less safe"

Seat belts are also not an absolute ward against death in an accident.

An improvement is an improvement. A flaw of seatbelts is that some people still die when they wear them. That's not a valid argument to not wear seatbelts.

Aren't the injuries trivial compared to the large risk of death? If seat belts are to be praised, it would be because they helped the pilot regain control, not for preventing some passenger bruising.

So I guess the safety belt is also much more dangerous than not having it, as more people have accidents with seatbelts on? Similarly faulty logic.

“Why wear a seatbelt your car can crash and you can die anyway.”

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.


No, I would be saying that wearing a seatbelt improperly is obviously dangerous and ill-advised.

What about seatbelts?

People are stupid. Seat belts that appeared to work but didn't actually keep you safe would be illegal even if labeled.

I think you are mistaking safety for security. The whole discussion is about security - preventing attacks from attackers on purpose. What you described here in the seat belt example is safety - preventing accidents that happen without intention/malice.

You can talk about literally anything that way, as long as you've already made up your mind. Here watch:

Everyone's always talking about the benefits of seatbelts, but it's just a distraction by big seatbelt to deflect from the harm seatbelts cause. All these "statistics" and "studies" about people surviving maybe because they were restrained are just to cover up the fact that some people are burned alive in crashes because they can't get out of these aforementioned restraints! Any discussion of the benefits of seatbelts exists only to spit on their graves.


People die wearing seatbelts. They are still safer than not wearing seatbelts.

I think it’s more “what benefit is there to not having your seatbelt buckled that justifies and increased risk of death?”

Most car crashes are extremely preventable. Do some people not drive more dangerously because they believe themselves to be safe because of things like seat belts?
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