How do seat belts work?

This video, put together by the University of California in the late 1950s, has a straightforward agenda: explain how car crashes and seat belts work, and why wearing the latter helps you survive the former. The message resounds clearly to this day.

The educational video covers some of the more technical points of car crashes, explaining how it is in fact the "second collision" of a person hitting the inside of the car that causes bodily harm, and how seat belts minimize that danger.

"Thrown clear"? Yeah, not likely.

The cars may be different, and we may have switched from lap to lap-and-shoulder belts, but seat belts address the same dangers as they always have.