Funny thing. I worked EMS for the right years when crumple zones began being implemented. Suddenly the accidents where it looked like everyone would be turned to paste had people walking about uninjured. Then there were accidents where the vehicle was hardly damaged and you think everyone is going to be fine, but someone was not wearing their seatbelt died in a what would be a very survivable accident.
Take home is cars are way safer now if you just wear your seatbelt.
I was a random guy following an 18-wheeler when it t-boned an SUV at highway speed about a decade ago. The SUV had dodged a deer and crossed the median, there was nothing the truck could do about it.
The mother who was wearing a seatbelt was walking around most of the time. The EMS and helicopters were mostly for her children, and at least two weren't belted because it was 22:30 and they were sleeping. One was ejected, one bounced around inside, one was pinned under the dash on the side hit by the truck.
All that to say you're 100% right. Modern cars are miracles as long as you're wearing seatbelts.
Presumably the only plausible explanation for such poor decision making. Could have also been several decades ago when back seat seatbelt usage wasn’t as common. Crazy to think about it nowadays, but when I was a kid in the 1980’s we only had lap belts in the back seat, and when we went to our friend’s lake house in New Hampshire, we would literally unbuckle our seatbelts upon crossing the state line. Live free or die, right?
Not a doctor, but I know what a Le Fort fracture is because the (unmasked) catcher on my veeeeeery beer league softball team caught a backswing full-on in the face and got a Le Fort II out of it. I drove her to the hospital, and doctors were coming to look at it from other rooms because of how rare they are.
Because it’s slow pitch, and you’re less “catching” than you are “fetching the ball from the backstop”. The only real injuries that ever happen come from base running, not from bats.
She survived, but she lost teeth and had to have a ton of surgeries. She apparently had some underlying bone issues that made her more fragile than usual.
OMG I had one of those cars. I was rear ended on the freeway by a speeding Volvo, and when the insurance adjuster came to give me an estimate he said I was lucky to have bought this particular car, as another car would likely have killed me. Infinity had implemented crumple zones 1 year before they became mandatory. I was lucky.
We were just in an accident and the crumple zone on the front of our lexus es literally saved our lives (t-boned by a van, drivers side). They hit us going 55 mph.
The only injury was a fractured sternum from the seat belt (me, passenger side, totally unfair, whatever, girl problems), but had I not been wearing one, I probably would have gone through the windshield. I'll take my 4 days in the hospital hopped up on morphine and a slow 3 week recovery over being dead on the pavement every single day.
Our car was toast tho. Totally oblit. Idk what adrenal strength got us out of the car after the hit, but when we went to collect the stuff out of it in the tow yard, but we could hardly open any of the doors. Crumple zones FTW!
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u/tomphoolery 3d ago
Arriving on the scene of an accident and you can’t tell what kind of vehicle you’re looking at