Oakland, CA, October 17, 1989, 5:04 pm. 107 vehicles, containing 162 total occupants, are driving across a section of the Cypress Street Viaduct just as a massive earthquake hits, causing the upper deck of this section to come crashing down to the lower deck and killing 42 of those people.
The biggest death toll is on the lower deck, where 35 of the 77 people on that deck are killed. Just 7 out of the 85 on the upper deck died, with 2 of these being fatalities in vehicles that left the roadway and crashed down to the ground below.
The remaining 5 fatalities were all in one vehicle - a 1985 Dodge van. This van had a rather severe frontal impact, enough to push the front bumper back about 1.5 feet. There were 8 occupants - a driver and front passenger, 2 in the second row, 3 in the third row and one in the fourth row. All 8 were wearing the available seat belts.
One would think the front seat occupants would have been the worst off - there was major damage to the front seating area, with significant intrusion of the dash and footwell limiting survival space. The driver and front passenger were seriously injured, but were among the survivors. Of the six in the other rows, only one survived - and her injuries were extremely severe, so severe that she could not be interviewed several weeks later.
What killed 5 people and brought one to the brink of death in a relatively intact section of that van? Lap belts. The front seated occupants had 3 point belts, while the rest of the van had only lap belts. All of the fatally injured occupants had severe abdominal injuries.
Lap belts concentrate the forces on the abdomen, while 3-point belts spread them among the entire torso. In addition, with just a lap belt, the entire upper body has nothing to stop it, and occupants can double over, striking their head on the dashboard or lower areas, such as their knees or the seat frame, with deadly force.
3-point seat belts were Federally mandated with vehicles built starting January 1, 1968, but they weren't mandated in the back seats until December 11, 1989, and in the middle rear seat until September 1, 2007 - nearly 40 years after the front seats were required to have them. Anything 1969 model year and later will have front 3-point belts, 1991 model or later will have rear outboard 3-point belts, and 2009 or later will have 3-point belts in every position. 1968, 1990 and 2008 vehicles will usually have them (and some older vehicles will have had them, ahead of standards) but some early-production vehicles from these model years, e.g. a 2008 built in June 2007 or a 1990 built in September 1989, may not.
To this day, even while the first-generation "Mike Tyson" airbags are nearly extinct on normal commuter vehicles (i.e. non-vintage), there are still lots of older cars on the road with only lap belts in the center-rear seat. If you're just looking for a cheap, economical car for daily use, you won't find anything with lap belts in the front seats. You're extremely unlikely to find lap belts in the rear, as the cheapest cars are typically about 15 to 25 years old anyway, and that's well beyond the 1989 cut-off date. But such a long oversight has turned most older 5 seat cars into, effectively, 4 seaters to this day.
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