In 2022, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety began evaluating seatbelt reminders in new vehicles. Despite the vast improvements in vehicle safety, auto fatalities in the United States have been trending upward, and about half of those deaths have one thing in common—the person wasn’t wearing their seatbelt.
"We have belt use that is over 90 percent in this country, but still half of the people who are dying in crashes in vehicles are unbelted," Jessica Jermakian, IIHS’s senior vice president of vehicle research, told Motor1 late last month when I visited the Institute’s Vehicle Research Center in Virginia.
