I miss you automatic bucklers. RIP.
My brother’s old ass Mazda had these. I thought it was a neat idea, but obviously flawed, even for the time they were new.
Side thought: One thing that I have been thinking about from time to time recently is how the culture war on seatbelts was finally and definitively won. You don’t hear people complaining on television anymore about how their freedom is being infringed by having to spend 3 extra seconds to buckle a seatbelt. I think kids today would be blown away with how much people argued about this back in the 90’s. It was no joke the dumbest shit that people argued about at the office watercooler day in and day out for years.
We really did have it good back then when the worst political bile we could muster was grumbling about whether or not seatbelts should be required to be worn while in vehicles. Meanwhile, fast forward to the modern day and we are seriously debating with each other whether or not certain people should have rights…
New Hampshire doesn’t require seat belts on anyone over 18. They actually sell seat belt male ends to insert into the female end to keep the car from chiming at the driver. I was surprised when someone got into my car annoyed about wearing a belt, they were from New Hamphire.
I believe NH is the only state left without a seat belt requirement!
Obviously there are still going to be holdouts no matter what the issue, but by and large people have come to accept that seatbelts are inherently good and should be worn at all times when in a moving vehicle. It’s no longer a debate in the public discourse, there’s just people who wear seatbelts and people who make excuses for why they shouldn’t have to or don’t want to.
I see smoking in a similar light - it was a culture war that raged on for ages before finally the general zeitgeist came around to accepting the facts that the tobacco industry tried for so long to bury - smoking is bad for your health. Whether or not people chose to continue smoking or not is irrelevant, I just marvel at the fact that we actually won that culture issue. The good guys won, and justice prevailed.
I just can’t see us collectively coming together as a culture and agreeing on anything like that ever again. It’s not that those topics were not politicized - they were - but we now live in a post-truth society where if we were still trying to debate about seatbelts or cigarettes there would be no way to break through the stubborn political trenches people have dug themselves into.
This is still a thing in any community that needs helmets and/or elbow and knee pads.
It never stops surprising me how eager some people are to become meat crayons
I met two people who hate seatbelts to this day: a old coworker and a pregnant woman. Both were able to wear without complaint with a large binder clip releaving the tension (on the belt at the shoulder)
when i was little friends of our had one of those , but nobody else. since it seemed rare i though thats what owning an automatic (car) meant. learnt about the shifting thing way later.
If you saw the ones on my mom’s 94 Nissan Sentra, you’d see they’re totally busted now, and the rails are only made of plastic, which long ago dryrotted and now the guide cables are just randomly hanging out and neither side works anymore.
Hell, even when they were brand spanking new, do you really trust your life to seatbelts only held in place by fucking plastic tracks?
Plus you still gotta manually latch the lower lap belt, which most people totally forget even exist when the shoulder belt is automatic.
That’s like the most dangerous form of seatbelt to have ever been made. Thankfully that shit rightfully died out, the OG 3 point seatbelt invented by Volvo is by far the best.
If you want photos of my mom’s damaged seatbelts to better understand, just message me back and I’ll see about getting and sharing a photo tomorrow or soon. It’s fucked.
Lol, I seen so many held on with paperclips. I refused to use them because I got a black eye from one in my buddies Probe lmao.
I don’t even wear my seat belt most of the time anymore. Run it
My least favorite word as a first responder: “ejected.”
Seatbelts are highly recommended, for obvious safety reasons that practically everyone understands and agrees with.
Unfortunately, in the condition my mom’s car is now in, the seatbelts no longer function and aren’t even usable anymore. If it counts for anything though, she barely even drives it maybe once or twice a month right around the corner to occasionally get a few groceries and her medicine and local stuff.
She almost never puts it on the highway anymore, unless absolutely necessary. She gets most of her groceries and products delivered anymore.
Usually I’d say there’s absolutely no excuse to not wear seatbelts, but in her case it’s a malfunction of a worn out piss poor design, she only drives it when necessary.
My excuse is I just don’t care anymore.
“My excuse is i don’t have one, and i’m also irresponsible towards others”
If you wanna die so much you should seek help instead of endangering others through your carelessness. The belt doesn’t just protect you, but also stops your sorry ass from becoming a giant projectile hurtling into others.
Wheee!
They did this because laws required an automated restraint, and these were cheaper to install then airbags.
my old car had these and did not have airbags
I do not disbelieve you, but now I need to do some looking up because that’s fascinating. literally
Right, that’s exactly what he said. For a few years, a car could either have airbags or automatic seatbelts. So a lot of cars chose the cheap seatbelt option, and omitted airbags. Then airbags became mandatory, and suddenly then didn’t want to do the auto seat belts.
This is funny because its from an article that uses the same picture why they are tereible… https://www.motorbiscuit.com/automatic-seat-belt-terrible-idea/
By even the late 90s? Yeah, they were a REALLY REALLY REALLY stupid idea.
But understand that in the 70s and 80s it was still very socially acceptable to refuse to wear a seatbelt with many outright claiming it was more dangerous because you would be trapped in a burning car instead of thrown clear. Yes, boomers were always dumbfucks.
But, by those standards? Something is better than nothing and a system that forces people to at least be partially restrained was a good idea. It was eventually replaced with education (LOTS of tv shows had Very Special Episodes about why you wear your fucking seatbelt) and the nag chime (… that people now bypass by buying metal clips to insert into the buckle).
I remember those dumbfucks as a kid in the 00s.
My Camry had this! I haven’t thought about that in forever!
Pls help if you know why these aren’t around anymore–I need to know
They were actually more unsafe because only the part across your torso was automated and you still had to manually buckle the lap belt. People generally didn’t do that and got injured badly, a standard 3 point plus airbag is much safer. Then add in the driver side door airbag and the system is doooooomed
And they ended up being more annoying to buckle for people with less mobility because they’d have to twist two directions to reach both ends of the lap belt, whereas the standard 3-point allowed them to more easily reach the belt when it was retracted.
Lol wait, these had lapbelts with them? Uhhh, yeah glad I didn’t get in any wrecks with it. Oops…
I got a citation for not having mine on right outside my house Don’t ask how the cop could determine this. That would dignify them too much
Yep. I didn’t even know this for over a decade on my mom’s 94 Nissan Sentra. Apparently the lap belts had retracted underneath the rear floor mats. Mom didn’t know either.
I had always assumed the buckles for those were meant for some odd central child safety seat add-on, but nope, they were for the totally hidden lap belts. 🤦♂️
I didn’t find out until a previous related online thread only last year, which sent me on the hunt for the hidden lap belts, which I could have previously swore didn’t even exist.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration passed regulations in the late 70’s requiring active safety features of either an airbag system or automatic seat belts by the late 80’s (the legal saga of those regulations coming into effect is its own long story). Then, in 1995, airbags became mandatory, so the automatic seatbelt systems became redundant for regulatory compliance. And culturally, by 1995 people actually were choosing to wear their seatbelts, so that the automatic seatbelt systems didn’t actually make as big of a difference in practice.
There were probably a lot of reasons why automatic seat belts were a passing phase, but the safety regulations you mention were likely the most significant. I believe automatic seat belts were considered valid passive side restraint and cheaper to implement until side airbag technology became the more economic choice. Plus all of the additional downsides like mechanical complexity and consumer preference stuff mentioned in other replies.
Anecdotally, the non-seat-belt types I knew would always just keep in unbuckled anyways. 🤷
I made a seperate reply but…
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/automatic-seat-belt-terrible-idea/
Not too sure, but I heard that some people trying to quickly get out would have these belts go around thier neck choking them. So injury risk ig?
Check my other top level comment. I seriously might try to get and share a photo of just how bad these things are tomorrow. They’re only reinforced with a plastic track…
deleted by creator
If you were tall, it was more like an abusive relationship.
It’d smash you in the head, ear or shoulder before hugging you. And if you unhooked the shoulder belt it would yell at you the whole time.
I recently got one of the cars pictured. These belts are junk but it sure was cool.
TSMT
What vehicle did it best? I felt Ford Escorts were pretty slickMy first car was a 1989 ford escort hatchback and I miss it terribly. They’re fairly difficult to find now thanks to the stupid cash for clunkers program that laundered hundreds millions into the auto industry and wasted tens of millions of perfectly fine cars so that people could get into consumer debt and waste a shitload of resources getting into a modern suv that is barely more efficient in most cases (1989 ford escort hatchback got 25mpg on average, in line with many modern boat cars, and doesn’t destroy pedestrians or take up 8 city blocks to park)
That mpg is stellar, but I even felt they drove/handled quite well too. So much nostalgia with my first 94 model
It made me love small cars forever. Even now I am a fairly large person at 189cm but I drive a Smart Fortwo. They just are far more nimble and responsive, like a go kart. Whenever I drive a friend or family’s suv or truck it’s like “how do you do this? This is like piloting a boat”
I’ll raise you a modern 3/4 ton truck, it handles like a shipping container, and barely fits anywhere. I love that truck, but if it wasn’t for work, I’d opt for a sedan.
Had one for three months before the gas tank rusted through and couldn’t get a replacement. Loved that car ❤️
Our first new car in the 90s had fixed ones of these. No motorized track, so I guess that’s good from the safety/strength point of view. Basically you’d have to get in while avoiding the stretched belt and then shut the door. Maybe it was a first attempt and the track ones were to fix how cumbersome it was. The good news, we could detach it from the mount at the top, and that’s exactly how we’d do it - get in the car, then buckle the top first, then the lap belt in a two step motion.
That was just an even cheaper option, not a first step.
It was an entry level car, so yeah. At least the cheaper version was actually bolted down to the door frame.
I had a Toyota Tercel that was that way…
Shout-out or throwback?
tuck me in
I get that feeling when a car tightens your seatbelt when you start driving.
Like a lil hug.Like a lil boa constrictor hug!
I heard those were discontinued because they would allow people in serious accidents to be ejected from the car. Is that true? I never looked into it
It was just because of regulations. There were a few years in the US when they had to have either automatic belts or airbags. It took a couple of years before the manufacturers got their shit together for airbags, so they had these things. Once they all had airbags, these went away.
