We ran across an interesting article in Parade on a vehicle safety topic worth sharing. The publication writes that emergency room physicians are warning car occupants to stop putting their feet on the dashboard -as it could lead to a life-threatening injury in a crash. ER docs are urging both motorists and passengers to abandon the habit that they see too often because the casual, seemingly harmless posture can dramatically worsen injuries in a crash.
In a frontal collision, force vectors cascade rapidly. With feet elevated, the dashboard becomes a fulcrum. The legs can be thrust backward into unnatural angles. Joints may dislocate, ligaments tear, bones shatter, and fractured femurs or tibias can drive into the pelvis or abdomen. In particularly violent collisions, shattered bone fragments may pierce internal organs or blood vessels.
Airbags complicate the situation further. These systems deploy with great speed and force. A foot resting on the dash can alter the expected trajectory of your lower limbs when the airbag inflates. Knees may be forced backward into your face or ribcage rather than being held more or less in a straight line. Hip fractures become far more likely when the legs are misaligned at the moment of impact.
The torso-to‐lower body interface becomes vulnerable. In many crashes, trauma is not limited to the chest or head; insult to the pelvis and abdomen is common when legs are mispositioned. An improperly angled leg may conduct crash energy into the spine, sacrum or bladder region. Brutal torque through the femur or knee joints can contribute to spinal compression or vertebral injury.
Consider collisions at moderate speeds — even then, the structural integrity of your legs matters. When your feet are down on the floor and pressed into proper seating alignment, crash energy tends to travel upward through bones and soft tissues along their designed load paths. By contrast, when your limbs are off axis, the loads become unpredictable and destructive.
Emergency rooms nationwide report cases where otherwise survivable crashes leave victims with catastrophic leg, pelvic or internal injuries because of improper posture. Some patients arrive with bilateral femur fractures, shattered kneecaps, or pelvis de-gloving injuries. Others endure abdominal lacerations from bone fragments or vascular tears from diverted force.
In many of those instances, the difference between a manageable recovery and lifelong impairment lies in how the person was seated seconds before the crash. The legs are not passive appendages in a collision — they are conduits for kinetic energy. Their position matters.
The warning extends beyond feet on the dash. Physicians advise against any unnatural limb positioning: no resting your legs crookedly across the seat, no stretching into seats ahead, and no dangling limbs out of reach of restraint systems. Every ride carries uncertainty.
Seat belts and airbags are engineered under assumptions of standard seating posture: feet on floor, body upright, limbs restrained. When configuration deviates, safety systems may become weapons rather than shields. The injury patterns then become less predictable and often more severe.
In the moments after a crash, first responders may face patients with mangled extremities, internal hemorrhage or compound fractures. Some of those outcomes could have been mitigated by proper seating posture before impact.
The message from emergency medicine is clear: safe posture inside the car is not just a matter of comfort — it’s a frontline defense. The path of least injury is the one where your legs remain low and aligned, your feet on the floor, hands on the wheel, and your body braced by the seat.
In every crash, milliseconds determine the devastation. The position you occupy in that fraction of a second can spell the difference between survival, disability or worse. In a system built on crash physics, doing the small things right matters. Keep your feet down — because in a collision, they might carry the cost of your recovery.
Photo Credit: Fabi Mingrino/Shutterstock.com.