Seat belt laws have been slow to come around in some places. While the United States has been among the vanguard nations in invoking effective seat belt legislation, even it has been somewhat slow in coming together. One might almost think that in some countries, it’s just easier to throw yourself through the windshield than it is to be properly protected under the law.

For example, seat belts have been around since the 1950s. However, the passage of a very forward-thinking law back in 1974 was extremely short lived because of the supposed inconvenience of having every seat belt in the car be buckled. At that rare moment of clarity, Congress decided that Americans should not be able to start their cars until the seat belts were buckled. While this was a very sane and reasonable mandate for all cars to have such a safety feature, the public’s outcry over its inconvenience was enough to stop this law cold.

In the United Kingdom, the same kind of slowness and foot-dragging also occurred. While the British never enacted such an aggressive type of legislation, their slowness to act may have cost them many thousands of lives unnecessarily. For adult passengers in the back seats of British automobiles, it was not a legal requirement to wear a seatbelt until 1991. One can only imagine the scene of people wearing pastels and having flat tops while Milli Vanilli played in the background and they complained about having to mess up their parachute pants by belting themselves into the vehicle.