A new campaign to promote the wearing of seat belts is to be run through November hoping to highlight that in a car accident it is often the bodies forward momentum impacting in the car which causes the fatal injuries in a road accident, which in most cases could be prevented by the use of the seat belt.

The THINK! campaign which was launched by Jim Fitzpatrick, the Road Safety Minister will include TV, radio, cinema, online and poster based materials based on when people are least likely to wear their seat belt.

Research shows that young men are least likely to wear seat belts, and that some people believe incorrectly that if airbags are present that the wearing of seat belts is unnecessary, they are in fact designed to work in tandem. The most common journeys where people don't buckle up are short low speed ones on familiar roads the research showed, but just because people know the area, they need to realise this doesn't protect them from what could be fatal injuries should they be involved in a car accident.

The latest campaign is just one in a long line dating back to 1970 when Jimmy Saville appeared in the "Clunk Click" commercials, which illustrated the dangers of being thrown through the windscreen in a road accident, this in a time when most people didn't bother with wearing a seat belt.

Director of Policy and Research at the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) Neil Greig welcomed the campaign saying: “When you wear a seatbelt you ‘switch on’ three decades of engineering research and allow your car to give you the full protection it was designed to deliver. It is probably the single most important safety feature in a modern car.”

The Department for Transport (DfT) has been promoting the safety benefits of wearing seat belts since 1973, and has an online car crash simulator showing the likely outcome of car accident scenarios you set up.

Many people fail to realise that all a vehicles safety features are tested assuming that the vehicles occupants are wearing seat belts, and so operate less efficiently in a road accident if the restraints are not being worn.

Accident statistics for 2002 to 2006 show that 353 fatalities as the result of road accidents could have been avoided each year if all the vehicles occupants had been wearing seat belts.