Yeah but if you drive into a lake, even without the panic and well practiced motions, untangling yourself from a seatbelt could delay your escape by 5 to 10 seconds; a significant portion of the estimated 30-45 seconds you'll have to escape a sinking vehicle. You'll probably say something like "It doesn't take me even 5 seconds to undo my seatbelt" so I'll just point out that every time you've done so to date, your car was not nose-down like an amusement park ride.
> Its air bags I object to having to pay for. Have never been in a situation where they would have been an advantage, and that includes 62 years of driving.
Good for you. Unfortunately for your argument, the entire point of a safety device is that you hope to never need it. Have you ever been in a collision bad enough that the seat belt broke a rib or at least left bruise marks across your chest? If not, you have also never been in a situation where a seatbelt would have been an advantage... but you seem to at least understand their efficacy, because you wear them. Meanwhile, airbags save an order of magnitude more lives than the number of people who drive into bodies of water, let alone die as a result.
The fact that drowning in a sinking car is so rare is what makes the national news almost every time it happens. Someone gets into a severe collision and the airbags and seatbelts keep them alive is so common it hardly gets mentioned as part of a local traffic report.
Yet here you are arguing against airbags, yet for rear windows based on some hypothetical advantage they might offer in an already rare occurrence... despite protocol for rescuing people from sinking vehicles not involving rear windows because dragging someone over/between the front seats in near zero visibility in a moment where every second counts is far worse an option than busting out the side window and opening the door. It is the definition of irrational.
=Smidge=