Car Keys UK
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2020–2026
0:32 · 1M views · Feb 11, 2009
A one-minute UK road safety advert showing a family car crash in which an unbelted rear passenger kills his mother in a head-on collision. It is a notoriously graphic public information film.
HN cites it as an example of fear-based public safety messaging that sticks in memory.
6 comments from Hacker News
Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships. I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on. I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though. I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself: this video [LINK] I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory
> I think you are misrepresenting my statement. I said "without any speakable side effects". > You always have to compare potential side effects of a measure against the effects of the things the measure should protect against. Safety belts might be detrimental to saving you life in traffic accidents in a not insignificant percentage of cases (e.g. being trapped in a burning car) – however if you compare it to the likelyhood of dying because you are not using a safety belt the whole thing is miniscule. And there are still ways to reduce the risk of dying from a seat belt even further. I have a seat belt cutter in my car for a reason. There is no such mitigation for vaccines. > Many people say they don't want to get vaccinated because they don't know about the long term effects of such a vaccination. But if they were honest they would need to admit that they don't know about the long term effects of getting the virus as well. Not to speak of the real risk to die or destroy your respiratory apartus in the process, in which case worrying about purely hypothetical long term effects seems to be a little delusional. Except that viruses tend to get less deadly over time, which we are seeing with Delta. So I can take precautions to reduce the chances of catching COVID, which indirectly reduces my chances of having a long-term side effect of COVID. > The one minor difference to the safety belt example is that your choice also affects the risk for the rest of society. If you dont wear
I'm trying to read your comments charitably and made in good faith but I'll admit it is proving to be a challenge here. In the UK they ran a campaign to raise awareness that during an accident a passenger riding in the back can injure the passenger in front if they don't wear a seatbelt. That seems like a serious externality to me. I don't know if you just hate seatbelts or love arguing but there are absolutely reasons that people should wear seatbelts and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now. this video [LINK]
I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well. Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;) The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass. I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum. And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: this video
I assume [LINK] is the one you are thinking of (there was a shorter version that aired in TV ad breaks). The Think! campaign was always pretty on-the-nose, as you need to be sometimes to get these messages across. The seatbelt and in-town speed limit ones stick in the mind too: this video and [LINK] respectively. The memorably stark tone and the frequency they were on TV made these spots ripe for parody, for example this one from Monkey Dust: [LINK]