The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which works under the United States Department of Transportation, announced a new proposal they have regarding seat belt use. The new proposal poses a design change to vehicles that would set them up to have seat belt warning systems beyond just those used for the driver and front passenger.

The system they propose would update and expand upon current systems. It would establish requirements for the warnings already in existence and also create seat belt warnings for the back seats of cars. The purpose of this is to encourage more frequent seat belt use.

Seat belt use has become a larger issue due to recent years of statistics showing a frequent lack of seat belt use in vehicles that have fatal accidents.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s current acting administrator, Ann Carlson, “wearing a seat belt is one of the most effective ways to prevent injury and death in a crash.” She shared a statistic that showed there were approximately 43,000 fatalities in 2021 in car accidents. About half of the 43,000 were shown to have not had their seat belts on. The NHTSA’s proposal seeks to lower that number.

The new system that they are proposing involves visual and audio warnings that go off when the front passenger seat belt is not connected. The only thing that would deactivate the warnings is having the passenger and driver seat belts fully connected.

The new system would also employ visual warnings when a backseat seat belt is not connected.

This warning would appear for a regulated 60 seconds. After that, if a backseat seat belt was disconnected while the car was in motion, there would be an audio warning that would be active until the seat belt was reconnected.

Presently, these features are seen in some vehicles, but they are not regulated or required. The only current requirement is for visual and audio warnings for the driver’s seat. The proposal from NHTSA would require these features and a warning for all seats in the car. According to their research, they believe the features will reduce accident-caused fatalities by more than 100. They also are pushing for these regulations to apply, not just to cars, but also to trucks, most buses, and just about any vehicle that weighs in at 10,000 pounds or less.