Thank the federal government.
The reason this is the case, near as I can tell, is that for the modern leftist government is a god. Statism is a religion.
Even when government is the cause of the problems, people so often turn around and want more government to fix them.
Markets work best when you can attach a profit mechanism to a worthy goal (or just the task at hand).
Usually, it seems like things get invented by someone else first and sold to safety-minded consumers and then mandated by the government when they realize what a great idea it is. The rearview camera is a good example of this: lots of cars have them to improve visibility, and there's lots of data showing how many kids and pets get backed over every year, so the US government has mandated that all new cars have them by 2018. My new car has one, and honestly, I'm not sure how I ever got along without it now. Aside from kids, it makes backing up so much easier it's ridiculous; I can easily back into very tiny spaces leaving 12 inches of space behind my rear bumper, something I could never do with my previous smaller cars. That makes it easier to do parallel parking for instance.
Only later was his research used to design restraints, and also create the instrumented crash test dummies that are used in automobile crash tests.
There are videos on Youtube of the early crash tests that were performed - they're rather comical to today's eyes. But they were serious business that was top secret - the car companies didn't want it to get out that their cars could crash and harm their customers (despite everyone knowing someone who was in an auto accident). Compare that to the publicity of the Ad Council's PSAs from the late 80's with crash test dummies Vince and Larry, with the tagline "You Could Learn A Lot From a Dummy". Big change in attitudes.