Brits are remembering morbid advert which left them 'traumatised' in the cinema

If you asked a Brit what the difference in fatality rates between being hit by a car at 30 and 40mph was, they'd probably be able to tell you.

Quite why you'd be wanting to know this I'm sure I don't know, but thanks to a frankly harrowing road safety advert which underlines that 'it's 30 for a reason' featuring a little girl who's been killed by a car, you'll get your answer.

In the advert, which aired back in 2006 across the UK, a little girl is seen slumped against a tree with her bones broken and blood dripping from her ear.

She then narrates: "If you hit me at 40mph there's around an 80 percent chance I'll die."

Then she starts breathing, her broken bones crack back into place and the blood coming from her ear suddenly goes in reverse.

The girl's arms move and her body is dragged by an unseen force back into the middle of the road, where she then sits up and takes a deep breath.

Think!

"Hit me at 30 and there's around an 80 percent chance I'll live," she says as the advert's message that 'It's 30 for a reason' comes on the screen.

The morbid advert featuring a child's broken corpse that come back to life is one of the many entries in the proud British tradition of scaring people absolutely s**tless to get road safety messages across.

While some of our nation's road safety adverts were a bit more jolly in tone, with friendly figures like Batman and singing animated hedgehogs to get the point across, us Brits seemingly love our safety ads to be on the morbid side.

Whether it's replaying footage of a motorcyclist dying because a driver pulled out of a junction without looking, or a careless motorist bleeding out on their bonnet because they didn't wear a seatbelt, gory imagery really seems to have an impact on us.

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While Brits have admitted to being 'petrified' and 'terrified' at the advert featuring the girl's bones cracking back into place as she comes back to life, it's certainly left an effective if traumatising message to remember.

"This really f**ked me up for a long time when I was young. Still think about this ad 20 years later. It worked," one said.

Another said the advert was 'the source of my nightmares especially in the cinema', while a third said it 'terrified' them to the point that they always go 30 in a 30 zone.

This stuff may be gruesome, but if you can get the message to stick in people's minds it works - like the 90s' ad where a boy who doesn't wear his seatbelt crushes his mother to death in a car crash.

It led to a 23 percent increase in seatbelt use in the UK over the next year, so it certainly did something right.