A Guide to Best Life-saving Car Safety Features
It's doubtful Leslie Nolan will forget to buckle her seat belt. That's because four years ago she was involved in a crash outside the Detroit suburb of Oak Park. The 1997 Chrysler Town and County minivan she was driving hit a pickup truck that had run a red light. She and her two sons, then 15 and 10, suffered minor injuries that could have been worse had their airbags not deployed or their seat belts not been fastened.
"The seat belts kept us in the car, and the airbags kept our faces from hitting the dashboard and steering wheel," says Nolan, 49, a business analyst who lives in Detroit with her husband and three children. "I had some minor injuries, but my sons were OK. If you had seen the car from the inside, it looked like nothing happened, because the airbags protected us. But on the outside, the car was just totaled."
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Seat belts and airbags are just two of a handful of safety features that industry experts say help save lives each year.
Another, electronic stability control (ESC), makes "a zero driver look like a hero," says Jeff Bartlett, deputy editor online, autos, for www.ConsumerReports.org, by sensing impending skids and slides and applying the brakes to bring the car back under control.
Lane departure warning systems help avert accidents by awakening sleep-deprived drivers as they swerve into other lanes. This feature is especially important, since drowsy driving is the cause of 100,000 reported accidents each year.
Must-Have Mechanics
These are four of the 10 safety features that our panel of experts said best help drivers avoid accidents or reduce the level of injury in the case of a crash.
The most cutting-edge features are technological advances, like ESC and lane departure warning systems. Others in this category include anti-lock braking systems, which prevent a vehicle's wheels from locking by rapidly applying intermittent pressure when a driver brakes, and tire pressure monitoring systems, which rely on a dashboard warning light to alert drivers about under-inflated tires.
These features mean "we have the possibility of preventing crashes from happening altogether," says Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a leading safety-research group supported by the insurance industry. "That's where things are moving."
Of course, even the best technology can't prevent some accidents. That's where safety restraints come in.
Experts say more lives might be saved each year if children are seated in properly installed car and booster seats or more vehicles are equipped with side-impact and side-curtain airbags. These can protect the heads and chests of passengers during side-impact crashes.
Seat belts are so important that choosing not to use them can wipe out any benefits of front, side-impact and side-curtain airbags. Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that in 2006, 15,383 lives were saved as the result of seat belt use.
"Frontal airbags do not eliminate the need for seat belts," says Karen Aldana, a spokeswoman for the NHTSA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation. "In the event of a crash, seat belts are designed to keep you inside the vehicle and reduce the risk of you hitting the steering wheel, dashboard or windshield."