Seat belts are not the last word on personal safety when vehicles roll over, according to a new Public Citizen report that reveals the inadequacy of current seat belt technology in preventing death and serious injury from rollover crashes. When confronted with rollover deaths and injuries, industry and the Bush administration routinely shift the blame from unsafe vehicle design to the drivers and occupants themselves. The administration has insisted that increasing belt use is "the single most effective way to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries." When Congress raised the issue of sport utility vehicles' susceptibility to rollovers, the industry responded by deflecting the blame from vehicle design to SUV occupants' seat belt use. "If every SUV driver wore their seat belts, we'd save 1,000 lives a year," said one industry spokesperson. "We can make the vehicles safer, which we do, but we need the public to meet us halfway." As Public Citizen's report shows, however, seat belt usage is not the answer that industry and the administration insist that it is. From 1992 to 2002, 22,000 people who died in rollovers were wearing their seat belts. Approximately 400 people die every year because they were ejected from their vehicles during rollovers despite wearing seat belts. Over 50 percent of those who were partially ejected during rollovers were belted, and the government itself estimates that 55 percent of those who died or were injured because the vehicle roof was crushed in a rollover were in fact wearing their safety belts. The report, "Rolling Over on Safety: The Hidden Failures of Belts in Rollover Crashes," identifies several significant weaknesses in current belt technology that prevent them from working effectively during rollovers, among them the following:

• Some safety belt systems simply fail to remain latched at all during rollover crashes.
• Most belt straps are anchored to the frame of the vehicle rather than the seat itself. When vehicle frames are crushed and distorted during rollovers, these belts can release dangerous amounts of slack or be rendered inoperable altogether.
• Most belts lack a technology that pull back the slack in a belt strap when crash sensors are alerted. This technology, called rollover pretensioners, would help keep an occupant in the seat itself and not bouncing upward into the roof.

Because of these failures, Public Citizen calls for improved safety belt standards. With safety belts not the panacea promised by industry and the administration, the report also calls for passage of new protective standards that would make vehicles less prone to rollover and less dangerous during rollover crashes.