three-point seat belt

Last year roughly 17,000 car occupants nationwide needlessly died because they failed to take just three seconds inside the vehicle to virtually guarantee their safety. The three-point seat belt, a Swedish engineer's breakthrough invention in 1959, remains the single most effective automotive safety feature ever created. But it's being ignored too often, which explains the current, sharp rise in traffic fatalities -- and the nation's biggest one-year spike in 50 years.