Fury at fake seat belt top

A ROAD safety group has criticised a discount company for promoting a T-shirt in the UAE that tries to fool police into thinking the driver is wearing a seat belt.

Groupon, one of the world’s fastest growing companies, has deleted the photo of the T-shirt from its UAE facebook account and said it was posted by mistake.

It featured a man in a car with a T-shirt with a diagonal black stripe that is meant to look like a seat belt. It also included another photo of the T-shirt, which could help motorists avoid detection for not wearing a seat belt.

UAE campaign group Buckle Up In The Back, which promotes seat belt use, strongly criticised Groupon for trivialising the importance of wearing seat belts.

Buckle Up said it was disappointed that 12 people had shared the Groupon post by the time it was brought to Buckle Up’s attention.

“That’s 12 shares on a post from people who think this T-shirt is a cool, fun way to not wear a seatbelt,” it posted on its facebook page.

“A major company in the UAE has thought it a great idea to ‘joke’ about pretending to wear a seatbelt in a country where 63 per cent of all child deaths in the UAE are car-related. Funny? Not really - with over 44k ‘likes’ on their page think of the positive they could be doing.”

Other facebook users also complained about the Groupon posting on the Buckle Up page.

“Staggering hey?” wrote Julie Pakenham-Walsh. “But not surprised yet again. No thought for safety or the implications for human life!”

And Lilliam Fae Polland said it was “extremely tasteless! Shame on whoever thought this was a funny picture”.

A Groupon UAE manager said its social media manager had intended to post the image to his personal facebook account but accidentally posted it his work account, which was open at the time.

The firm deleted the post as soon as it realised.

sean@7days.ae