This Is The Safest Place To Sit In Your Car

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Don’t believe us? The numbers don’t lie: 100 years ago, there were around 18 motor vehicle-related deaths per 100 million miles driven; in the mid-1960s, the age of Chevy Impalas and Ford Mustangs, you could expect about 5.5 over the same distance. Today, the figure is just a little over a single death per 100 million miles.

But perhaps those odds are still too high for your liking. Is there some way of making your chances of survival even better? Well, if you’re okay with not being in the driving seat, then potentially yes.

“The rear middle seat is the safest place for most passengers,” Lucas Waldenback, co-founder of Zutobi, an educational driver’s ed platform focused on driver safety and risk reduction, told Reader’s Digest this month. According to a 2008 study, occupants in this seat have about a 46 percent higher chance of survival when involved in fatal crashes than passengers in the front seats; even considering only the rear seats, you’re 13 percent more likely to survive if you’re sat in the middle. 

What’s the reason for this huge difference in survival rates? It all comes down to design: what makes modern cars so much safer than their predecessors is because of features like crumple zones – places in the car that are designed to get crunched in a collision, not for some cynical consumerist reason but because that way the impact of the crash can be focused into these prescribed places. 

The middle back seat is, quite simply, situated furthest from all of these crumple zones – and as such, furthest from any area that experiences most of the force of impact. The upshot is that “in rear-end, frontal and side-impact crashes, that center position has consistently shown the lowest rate of serious injury when proper restraints are used,” Waldenback said.

However. That last piece of the advice is crucial: it’s not enough to just be sat in the right place, you have to be using all the safety features as intended. In a 2022 study that included unrestrained passengers – that is, no seat belts – people sitting in the back were actually far more likely to be hospitalized, and suffered more severe injuries and higher death rates, than those in the front. Why? Because in the back, people were about five times more likely to not wear their seat belts.

As Waldenback told Reader’s Digest: “There’s no ‘perfectly safe’ seat, only safer habits. Every trip, short or long, deserves the same focus and preparation. Safe driving starts with awareness and consistency, not luck.”

[H/T: Reader’s Digest]