>>Scenarios:
>>Car wreck, passengers trapped by seatbelts:
>>seatbelt cutter or one hander knife real handy,

With very, very few exceptions, unless you're a working paramedic on duty you should have no reason to cut somebody's seatbelt to get them out of the car. If the car is so badly damaged that the seatbelt release won't function, then you're almost guaranteed to cause more injury to the casualty by hauling them out of the car than you would leaving them where they are. (And you shouldn't be taking them out of the car anyway, regardless of how - or whether - you undid the seat belt.)

I suppose someone's going to say, what about the situation where the car is on fire, or under water? But despite what you see on the movies, those cases are unbelievably rare, and in the cases that do occur, you'd be faster simply reaching in and unbuckling the seat belt than fumbling around for your BenchHook.

>>FAK

and a current First Aid/CPR certificate to go with it, of course <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

>>Cell Phone - handy, not crushed under dashboard in handsfree cradle...

If your car is so badly trashed that you're unable to retrieve a cell-phone from its handsfree cradle, then I'll bet:

(a) there's a good chance that the cell-phone won't even be in the hands-free cradle, it'll be under the back seat, or 30 feet away in the trees;

(b) any cell-phone you had in your pocket will be sitting next to it; and

(c) you'll be in no shape to use it anyway (because you'll most likely be under a 20 foot thick layer of Los Angeles freeway <img src="images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> )

Yeah, there are always exceptions, but it seems to me you're more busy worrying about the 1 in 10 billion chance that might, conceivably, happen somewhere in the world to one person sometime this century, rather than preparing for the vastly more common, but mundane accidents that could occur.

Don't get me wrong, if the car is on fire, the passenger is screaming in pain, and you can't reach into the car to undo the seat belt because of the flames, then the seat-belt cutter would be a great thing to have. But I'm afraid that many people are going to be so eager to use their "toy" that they'll end up crippling or killing some poor schlub who would have lived to walk again if the good Samaritans hadn't severed his spinal chord, or ruptured his spleen, by "saving" him.

Sorry for the rant - for all I know, you're a working paramedic who's trained in how to extract injured passengers from a vehicle. (I'm not, btw, so any working paramedics or ER docs out there who wish to correct me are welcome to do so.) But people who talk blithely about slicing away seat belts to extract severely injured passengers from car crashes give me the willies. <img src="images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />