Wear a seat belt in both the front and back seats
Wearing a seat belt in the front seat cuts your risk of a fatal injury in a crash by roughly half; in the front of a light truck, by about 60%. Among US vehicle occupants killed in 2022 whose belt use was known, half were unbelted.
What it takes
Free. An extra 2 seconds whenever you get into a car.
What you may gain
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that seat belts reduce fatal injury risk by 45% for front-seat passenger-car occupants and 60% for front-seat light-truck occupants. Of people killed in passenger vehicles in the US in 2022 whose belt status was known, 50% were unrestrained. The World Health Organization (WHO) puts the reduction in vehicle occupants' risk of death at up to 50%. WHO estimates 248,099 road traffic deaths in China in 2021, or 17.4 per 100,000 people.
Context & considerations
Buckle up in the back too. In the same report, 60% of second-row occupants who died were unbelted. The 45% and 60% figures are NHTSA estimates derived from crash databases, citing Kahane 2015, rather than randomized trials. WHO's China death count is a modeled estimate several times higher than the police traffic-management total. The two systems count different things; this chapter uses WHO's definition consistently.
Research & references
NHTSA (2024). Occupant Protection in Passenger Vehicles: 2022 Data (DOT HS 813 573). https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813573 ; WHO (2025). Road traffic injuries fact sheet. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries ; WHO GHO RS_196/RS_198 (China, 2021). https://ghoapi.azureedge.net/api/RS_196?$filter=SpatialDim%20eq%20%27CHN%27