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That's me banging my head on the keyboard. I can't do this anymore.

You win.

Don't wear your seatbelt.

Airbags.

DEBATE OVER.

I mean no disrespect, but to me, a good analogy of what you're saying would be getting shot while wearing a bulletproof vest. Being shot while in one can definitely cause more damage than just bruising, but if you're not wearing one, then, with sufficient luck, the bullet (given it's not meant to fragment on impact) will go through the soft tissues and come out from the other side. No bones potentially broken. Good deal. Right?

Death also occurs when your body is smashed into a wall at 60mph. the amount of friction caused by you sitting on a seat is negligible unless you happen to have velcro pants

Seriously? People still think seatbelts are bad?
not a big enough:downswords: in the world.

I used to work in Crash Analysis where I had to investigate and report on every fatal crash in our region. People who didn't wear seatbelts (and there is a stupid amount who still don't) always ended up re-distributed across the landscape. These days modern cars have a ridiculous amount of protection systems built in to save your ass and not wearing your seatbelt basically negates all of them.

So, yeah, anyone who tries to propagate the idea that not wearing a seatbelt is a good idea should do us all a favour and give it a try next time they're hurtling towards a tree.

You know that the seatbelt is intended to spread the impact out over a longer period of time and a larger area, right? It's the difference between a tiny area of your steering wheel imparting the full force of the impact on a tiny area of your chest or face, causing huge amounts of damage, and that same impact force being spread across large areas of your pelvis and chest, and also being spread over more time (since the seatbelt will give more than the steering wheel will). To think that this force would somehow magically dissipate into the air if you are just given time to fly through the air for a split second is silly.

If you really think that air resistance and ass-to-seat friction is going to slow you down enough to not injure you when you inevitably smash into the windshield, or steering wheel, or the door of your car, then I challenge you to do this: Measure the distance between your left side while driving and your driver's side door. Probably at most 1 foot, right? Okay, now have a friend drive your car up to 40mph and jump out of the door when you are precisely 1 foot from a garbage dumpster. Now impact that dumpster with your left side. If I had to take a guess, I'd say that in that 1 foot distance, you're still going to be going essentially 40mph, and the air resistance and friction of the ground on your ass over that 1 foot is going to be worth basically nothing.

F=ma

P=F/A

Study.

THIS

Holy cow fizziks.

You know what? I actually wrote a fairly long reply to this, but then I realized that... Dash Rendar has been saying the exact same thing I was going to say. Alco, you're awful at physics. Awful awful awful. You're wrong, and this is almost as bad as friend14.

Cars have crumple zones.
Force is a function of work over distance.
A side impact crumple zone is the difference between the work of the collision being applied over an inch, and it being applied over a foot. I'll save you the trouble so you don't have to break out a calculator: wearing a seat belt means you're absorbing 1/12th the force you would if you became ballistic.

By the way, the amount of energy you lose to friction with your car seat and to wind resistance is... wait for it... almost nothing. A seat's like 2 feet long, the speeds are very slow and a human has a fairly small cross section. Even if the seat's made out of leather (mu roughly .6 leather against skin) it's almost nothing. So not only are you wrong about getting thrown clear of the crash, but even if you were right (and you aren't, you're wrong, very very wrong,) it wouldn't do anything to save you.

Main point of this post

Allow me to summarize this thread as I see it:

<Alco> I heard about someone surviving by being thrown clear of a collision once! It's a great idea, and I'm totally going to unbuckle the next time I'm about to get into an accident.
<Dash_rendar> What? That doesn't work.
<Alco> No, totally. f=mv
<Dash_rendar> No, really. That doesn't work.
<Alco> Yes it does. You're missing my point, lots of people survive because they're ejected into the object that hit them.
<Dash_rendar> **** this ****.
<Sanity> WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO SURVIVED BECAUSE THEY WERE WEARING THEIR SEATBELTS?????

I think this is the most accurate use of the term "devil's advocate" I've ever seen.

Deadman beat me to it. Some people here don't have very good reading skills.

Alco made a statement, and then I responded to it in a rather harsh manner, but NONE of that harshness was directed at Alco. He mentioned some people think they will survive without seatbelt and he wasn't one of them. I then said those people are stupid. It was his response to my initial comment that turned it into a fysics debate.

Actually, I meant to put that in my original post that that part would probably be negligible (it was never meant to be significant in my argument). The part about spreading the impact out over a greater area then the narrow area that a seatbelt covers was. Thank you for pointing that out and for the "fizziks" lesson.

Mostly, it was an attempt (even if a weak one) to try and explain some of the variables that might explain why some people survive in those situations and to offer a possible idea for an improved seatbelt system (which I did in the paragraph below that). Unlike mb, I don't believe in "luck". Everything can be explained, even if I personally lack the skills to do so. Throwing up our hands and chalking it up to "luck" seems silly to me when we can use it as an opportunity to investigate improvements.

Dash_rendar, I have nothing against you. I was just trying to stimulate an enlightful discussion based on observations that I've made. I hope you haven't taken any offense.

I was using 'luck' to say that its a 'very small margin for survival.' I've said this previously. They survive because they don't get their neck snapped on the way out of the car. You're more likely to survive inside a car because thats what its designed to do.

I'd much rather have a seatbelt and airbag protect me than cross my fingers and hope that my entire body (lolfat) slamming against the wall of the car is going to be "better."

What I'm saying is, you can't look at an accident where someones been thrown from a car and know HOW they survived, but obviously you'd know what didnt happen. The number of people who survive crashes where they're ejected is probably pretty low. The cars are designed to keep you safe in the car, theres not much they can do once you go out the windshield

The question is not, will mb survive the car crash, but will the rest of the world survive the consequences of mb flying through the air at a high rate of speed?

I used to believe this until I started studying science more in depth at college. You'd be amazed how much of the physical world is based not necessarily on "laws", but rather, probability. Luck is just probability. It controls our lives. Its not about what happens in any given scenario, its about what happens in most scenarios.



None at all

What happens in a thread stays in that thread as far as I'm concerned

**** physics. Don't be stupid, just wear your seatbelt. It's not that tough to grasp the value of something so simple that it needs to be a made law.

You do around here. If a cop sees you speeding by without a helmet, you're done.



Loving this quote. You sound more like you're complaining about the fact that they somehow luckily survived the crash.

I think the shields are given in the kyle.cog's MP message (very bottom). Just set the value to 0.

...?

uhhhhh, wrong thread buddy.

Unless the shields save Kyle from imminent automobile impact and he just floats away.

Now, that's not true. All new vehicles are required by law to have ABS, even though they are hazardous in many situations.

Also, laws change.

Sweet baby jeebus how did I miss this thread?

I don't even ride in cars with people who aren't wearing their seatbelt. A friend was killed from the impact of the other passenger slamming his head against the window. He was wearing his seatbelt and died, while the careless kid lived. I was really young but it stuck with me.

Do you realize that makes no sense?

I guess they figure the motorcyclist doesn't care about his safety in the first place since, you know, he's riding a motorcycle.

Why doesn't it? The person's body was thrown around the car and ended up hitting him in the head, which hit the window and killed him. The person that was thrown around survived.

A lot of people don't consider the fact that maybe the Seatbelt isn't just for their own protection. Do you think firefighters and paramedics like to scrape corpses or parts of bodies off the pavement? I pulled a 16 year old kid out of his crushed ford focus when he hit a tree doing 80. Yeah, he was wearing his seatbelt, but if he hadn't, we'd have probably been putting his pieces into a trash sack.

edit: to clarify, he WAS dead.

I believe Freelancer read it, as I did at first, as:



where the antecedent of 'his' is 'the other passenger'.

But I get it, now

A friend of mine was impaled through the head when his side of the car crashed in a pole

Seatbelts can cause internal injuries that I would consider way worse than dying instantly.

At BWI once a tug with two people got into an accident. Now, a tug is nothing but a big steel box on some leaf springs. They only go 15 mph. Now they had hit a pushback or something big on the ramp, I don't remember what. One of the people in the tug was wearing a seatbelt, the other wasn't. The guy not wearing his seatbelt busted his face open on the window, the guy wearing his seatbelt went to the hospital and almost died from internal bleeding. Me personally, I'd rather have a busted face.

I was in a pretty serious car accident, wearing my seatbelt. It sucked. If I hadn't been wearing my seatbelt the inside of my door wouldn't have cut me from temp to around the back of my head.

I still wear my seatbelt though.

The truth is, accidents suck. Don't get into accidents, theres a strong chance at high speeds you're going to be gravely injured no matter what you do.

Good advice. Defensive driving is way better than any seatbelt at keeping you from dying. I still always wear my seatbelt, though.

Automobiles are terrible. I wonder when people will wake up and realize how dangerous they really are. Just terrible.

Let's all wear our seat belts, though.



People are too busy worrying about things like SARS, Mad Cow Disease, and Swine flu.

Hey guys, I'm gonna wear my seat belt though just to be sure.