Lesson from a Car Crash: Seat Belt Can Save Your Life, Wear It
It was a split second moment between life and death on the road when one either gets crushed under the wheels of a speeding vehicle or miraculously survives for which one thanks one’s stars, providence, gods and everything good in the universe. I was caught in such a grim situation the other day from which I emerged unscathed though my brand new car suffered serious damage.
It was a coincidence that just the day before, I had browsed through the 1984 bestselling autobiography of Lee Iacocca, the American automobile icon, who saved Chrysler from bankruptcy. I specifically read the chapter titled ‘How to Save Lives’ though I must have gone through it when I first bought the book back in the 1990s.
The debate was still going on in that country about enforcing seat belt rules, which he fully supported. He says, “The plain truth is that if you are wearing a combined shoulder and lap-belt systems, it’s almost impossible to be killed under thirty miles per hour. Among other reasons, seat belts can prevent you from being knocked unconscious in a crash, which can happen even at relatively slow speeds.” Quoting a study, he says, “seat belts reduced serious injuries by up to 50 per cent and fatal injuries by as much as 75 per cent. And in the late 1960s, a study in Sweden examined almost 29,000 accidents among seat belt users and found not a single one had resulted in death.”
The forcible arguments he had advanced for using seat belts were more convincing than the occasional drives policemen in Kochi conduct. My new car also constantly reminded me through beeps, that often seemed like a nuisance, to put on the belt. So, I always wore it which finally saved me from the impact of a collision my car had with a speeding bus on the state highway. It was one of the city’s notorious killer buses that came violating the one-way rule because of a traffic jam in the evening that completely caught me off-guard while I was taking a U-turn towards the right lane.
I was only looking out for vehicles coming down from the left side and was about to complete the U-turn when the bus grazed through the front of the car tearing away its bonnet and other parts with a big bang and scattering them 10 metres away. The packed bus screeched to a halt some 30 metres away. I couldn’t make out for a moment what had happened but I managed to park the car on the other side of the road and came out after releasing the seat belt. I realised later, I did not at all feel the impact within and did not suffer even a scratch only because I was wearing the seat belt. And those who witnessed the accident said I had escaped by the skin of my teeth.
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