There are many other good points being made in this subthread, the one I'd like to make is that if a driver is wearing a seat belt as he should, if he doesn't h

There are many other good points being made in this subthread, the one I'd like to make is that if a driver is wearing a seat belt as he should, if he doesn't have an air bag and has a >= 35 mph collision, his head is going to hit the steering wheel, with worse and worse effects as the speed increases. And without other equipment that's not practical to put in civilian vehicles, that sort of give in the seat belt system is required to avoid other bad effects like snapping necks. It's all a carefully engineered system of tradeoffs, modulo Takata skipping the careful engineering step....