This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.
> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.
The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.
I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.
Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.
Frontal airbags, generally speaking, make people who would've died survive and make people who would've walked away with nothing look like they went a few rounds with a professional boxer. It's a flattening effect.
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”
Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
