The automotive industry has made great strides in vehicular safety and car brands in Malaysia, in particular, are championing for safer cars regardless whether it’s a compact hatchback or large SUV by subjecting their cars to the New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP).
Sadly, we take this luxury of safety for granted. Because I’ve seen way too many drivers on the road who don’t buckle up. You can have all the airbags in the world and the strongest chassis known to man but if you can’t do the simplest act of wearing your seat belts, all that effort into making a safe car just went down the gutter.
Crash test ratings are done under the premise that the occupants – toddlers, children, front and rear passengers – are properly strapped onto their seats before other safety features (passive and active) come together to keep you ALIVE, if you ever get into an accident. That’s the whole point of having a 5-Stars NCAP rating, otherwise you’re just a billiard ball taking full force from a cue stick. There are just one too many sad stories on the Google search page of “child flung out car”.
You may think it’s inconvenient to take two seconds to buckle up for that five-minute journey to the neighbourhood store but for some, it was the few seconds they wished they never saved.
