A safety belt comprises of approximately 300 yarn threads; each of these threads are spun from 100 polyester filaments.
Safety belts play a decisive role in protecting vehicle occupants and reduce the risk of injury and death in the case of certain accidents by 45 percent. Safety belt webbing has to handle tensile forces of more than three tons, while simultaneously stretching in a controlled manner in an emergency in order to reduce loads in the event of impact. Their manufacture from polyester yarn comprising up to 100 individual high-tenacity filaments is highly complex – they are, after all, lifesavers.
In the event of accidents, the number one lifesaver is not the vehicle’s bodywork or the airbag, but the safety belt. It firmly keeps vehicle occupants in position, therefore enabling other protection technologies to reveal their full functions in the first place. According to calculations, belt systems reduce moderate and severe injuries and the number of deaths among frontseat car occupants by 45 percent respectively. ADAC figures support this protective effectiveness: to this end, 98 percent of drivers and frontseat passengers meanwhile buckle up in Germany. However, the few people who do not wear safety belts account for 16.6 percent of all fatal car accidents in Germany.
