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Toyota and Taylor Swift Team Up to Promote Road Safety

As with other automakers, Toyota is working hard to make vehicles safer in a crash, adding sensors, complex passive safety systems, auto-braking and tons of airbags. But how useful are all these systems if people can’t even cope with the simplest one of them - the seatbelt.
Taylor Swift talking about safety 3 photos
Photo: screenshot from Youtube
Vehicle Safety Study in ASEAN (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam) on Seat Belt UsageFatality Rate in Traffic Accidents in which SRS Airbags were Deployed
Latest studies in ASEAN countries show that only 25 percent of vehicle passengers use the seatbelt all the time, whatever the seat they take in the car; 56 percent use it only when occupying the front seats, while the rest either forgets to buckle up or use it from time to time.

You might say that the percentage is OK as it is, but it gets pretty scary when you know that some 300 million people risk their life each day because they simply can’t stand a textile belt over their chest when traveling in a car.

And it’s not like we’re back in the days when the seatbelt was manually adjustable and once you have snuggly fasten it over your body, your mobility was restrained. All seatbelts now are pretensioned and will allow you to move freely, locking and restraining you only under sudden deceleration.

But if people don’t listen to the automakers’ advices, maybe they’ll start get safer if a cool celebrity delivers them the message. That’s what Toyota hopes to achieve by recently teaming up with seven-time Grammy Award winner Taylor Swift.

Part of her RED Tour in Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore this June, Taylor will help educate her fans on the importance of wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelt-wearing messages will be broadcasted via social media platforms and they will also be screened during concerts along with other traffic safety rules.

What Taylor Swift and Toyota want people to learn is the fact that only by fastening your seatbelt, the fatality rate in traffic accidents drops by around 15 times. And just because you have an inflatable “pillow” exiting through the dashboard at the moment of impact isn’t enough to keep you safe. Actually it's a hot balloon and you can also miss it by inches if the seatbelt isn't controlling your movement towards it.

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