Today, the seatbelt is revered as one of the most important advancements in automotive technology. The modern seatbelt is designed to keep you contained in a vehicle during a crash, and with the use of ample airbags seatbelts should help keep your vital body parts from mating with the hard surfaces of a vehicle. But it wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1950s, the seatbelts of back then were seen as messy, and both proponents and opponents made convincing arguments.
One of my hobbies is reading old vehicle periodicals. For as awesome as the internet is, so much information still isn’t on it. A lot of what was written down and published in magazines has never been digitalized. This might not matter so much if you’re talking about an icon like the Boeing 707 or a Volkswagen Beetle. But all sorts of more obscure subjects have never made it to the digital era. So, I like to see what I can learn from the nooks and crannies that aren’t crawled by search engines or just aren’t available online.
Last week, I found myself sifting through decades-old copies of MotorTrend hoping to find a road test of a Chevrolet Cameo Carrier or a Dodge D100 Sweptline. I had no luck on that front, but I did run into a fascinating debate about seatbelts from 1957.
The seatbelt has come so far from its humble origins. As History.com writes, English engineer Sir George Cayley is often credited with the invention of the seatbelt. The 19th-century creation kept glider passengers inside of the aircraft during hard landings or during turbulence. Early belts didn’t exactly look like what we’re used to today. Instead, they often resembled whatever idea their inventors had in their heads, including the Edward J. Claghorn automotive “Safety Belt” of 1885 (below), which looked like Batman’s utility belt.
As both History.com and MotorTrend note, the use of standard belts was most common in aviation, where pilots in World War I and World War II were secured to their aircraft through all sorts of maneuvers. MotorTrend notes that seatbelts also made their way into commercial aviation, where studies had shown that belts were effective at keeping passengers in their seats in heavy turbulence or hard landings.
Nash Motors is often credited with being the first American company to offer seatbelts when they were introduced as an option in 1948 for the 1949 model year. The California Highway Patrol began outfitting its cars with seatbelts in late 1952. Ford under Robert McNamara added its own seatbelts in 1955.
As both the 1957 MotorTrend piece and History.com note, the rate of crashes increased in the 1950s, and with those crashes came an increased public consciousness on car safety. Soon enough, there became two camps. Many folks thought seatbelts were death-contraptions while others swore by them. Weirdly, both sides actually had good points to make.
For Seatbelts
In 1955, neurologist Dr. C. Hunter Shelden published “PREVENTION, THE ONLY CURE FOR HEAD INJURIES RESULTING FROM AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENTS,“ in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In his paper, Dr. Shelden said that 10 percent of all of the cars on the road in America were involved in a crash of some kind in 1954. His research got darker immediately with the claim that “if injured, you have one chance in 15 of receiving an injury severe enough to result in permanent total disability.” His remedy? The only way to cure severe head trauma was not to experience it in the first place. Dr. Shelden believed seatbelts were the answer. “There is no doubt that seat belts in passenger cars will prevent many injuries and fatalities, if only the public will fasten them,” Dr. Shelden wrote.
But at the same time, Dr. Shelden realized that the seatbelts of 1955 weren’t good enough: “At least one can be sure that until improved designs are available the public is not going to take full advantage of this means of safety.”
In the aforementioned 1957 MotorTrend piece, the California Highway Patrol came to a similar conclusion. The MotorTrend story tells the tale of an officer who faced death while responding to a call. Officer Bill Harvey punched the throttle to respond to an accident that resulted in an injury, his patrol car cracking the 80 mph mark with its lights glowing and sirens blaring. While Harvey was racing to the scene, an oncoming pickup with six kids loosely hanging in its bed pulled into Harvey’s path of travel. Harvey slammed on his brakes and yanked his wheel over hard, hoping not to wipe out an entire family at 80 mph.
MotorTrend says the officer’s cruiser rolled twice, crashed over an embankment, and dragged down the highway for another 93 feet. Harvey’s brakes were locked for a full 144 feet before broadsiding the truck. Amazingly, Harvey was able to pull himself out of the wreck, with his only injuries being a couple of scratches and the need for a tetanus shot. Thankfully, the pickup driver survived, too. Though, MotorTrend doesn’t say what happened to the kids.
Here’s an example of what lap belts look like in a Nash Metropolitan:
Another CHP officer story told by MotorTrend was that of Dallas Clary, who tried to run through an intersection at 70 mph while responding to a call. One of the cars in the intersection attempted to turn left, entering Clary’s path. Clary jerked his wheel hard to the left, putting his car into a slide that was so fast it slid into and sheared off a “phone pole” while completely sideways. Clary was cut from the broken windshield but was otherwise unscathed enough to write a ticket to the driver who attempted the left turn.
By 1957, CHP said that 730 of its 807 patrol cars were equipped with belts, and that they had proven themselves in the field several times over, including in one crash where a patrol car struck a barrier and rolled twice at an alleged 90 mph. In another instance noted by MotorTrend, someone got into a crash that left their car partially inverted, sliding down the road. The driver door failed and the only thing keeping the person behind the wheel from becoming a road pizza was that seatbelt.
Against Seatbelts Of The ’50s
On the other side of the debate were those who said seatbelts were deathtraps. For all of CHP’s stories of belts saving the day, opponents argued that seatbelts as they existed in 1957 might have caused more harm than good.
Leading the charge against seatbelts in the 1957 MotorTrend piece was A.J. White, the director of Motor Vehicle Research, Incorporated. Motor Vehicle Research tried to advance automotive safety (and it also pitched an interesting sports car design). White started off his rebuttal by pointing out that lots of research and development had been poured into designing belts, but there was a lack of research in the actual efficacy of seatbelts.
Further, White noted that there was a commercial interest in seatbelts, with the Seat Belt Institute advocating for the installation of belts in as many cars as possible. White saw the financial incentives to be compelling, as belts could be installed into 60 million cars at $10 apiece and then further installed into 6 million new cars a year. That’s a lot of dough to be made for a manufacturer of a belt.
Motor Vehicle Research also found out that there were other non-safety incentives for seatbelts. In the 1950s, insurance companies gave drivers discounts for fitting their cars with seatbelts.
Motor Vehicle Research alleged that companies advocated for the use of seatbelts in cars since they worked so well in commercial airliners. Meanwhile, politicians tried to find ways to mandate seatbelts. One law would have mandated that every car be built with the mounting points for seatbelts already installed. Another law would have prevented the registration of a new car unless its owner installed seatbelts.
White’s biggest beef wasn’t with how belts were marketed or how insurance companies tried to lure customers to them with seatbelt discounts, it was how seatbelts were implemented in the 1950s. White pointed out how lifejackets were pretty much universally regarded as lifesaving devices. However, a lifejacket had to meet legal standards for its design and then had to undergo testing to prove it met those standards.
Such standards did not exist for seatbelts in the 1950s. As History.com noted and is confirmed by similar wording in the 1957 piece from MotorTrend, early seatbelt technology was a bit of a “Wild West.” There were no real standards for belt design or performance. Companies sort of just made whatever they wanted and said it would save your life.
This is something CHP noted in their support of seatbelts. CHP didn’t just buy any seatbelts. Internal testing had shown that some of the seatbelts on the market used unsatisfactory webbing, fastenings, or hardware. CHP’s testing revealed that some belts would stay together during a crash, but wouldn’t release afterward. Other belts broke open during crashes, which defeats the purpose of having a belt. Other issues included seatbelt webbing slipping or mounting points failing.
White noted that he wasn’t against seatbelts, but he was against how they were offered in the 1950s. He believed the belts of those days were not designed based on scientific analysis/investigation. White then noted examples where seatbelts did not save the day.
In one crash, a car slammed into an oak tree at 70 mph. The crash was so destructive that the vehicle’s engine was crushed into where the front seats of the car should have been. The occupants of the vehicle weren’t wearing their seatbelts and were thrown from the wreck. They survived and it was believed had they been wearing their seatbelts they would have perished. However, White also noted that the occupants of the vehicle were intoxicated. I wonder if this is the origin of the silly so-called “thrown clear of the accident” story that’s often used against seatbelts.
White continued by noting that even though CHP talked about seatbelts saving lives in severe crashes, officers were getting severe injuries in crashes where their cars got minor damage. This was allegedly because of seatbelts “snubbing” bodies in low-speed incidents. Motor Vehicle Research also conducted 200 crash tests and found that seatbelts were dangerously lacking.
In actual crash conditions, Motor Vehicle Research said that the lower body was protected, but lap belts acted like fulcrums, thrusting the heads of vehicle occupants into steering wheels and dashboards, causing severe brain trauma. At the time, Motor Vehicle Research noted, the majority of injuries suffered by those who survived crashes were head injuries, and seatbelts as they existed in 1957 didn’t do much to stop that.
It was the opinion of Motor Vehicle Research that the seatbelts of 1957, which were lap belts, carried such a great risk of causing great bodily harm that you were better off just not wearing a belt at all. That part was probably a stretch since at least some protection is better than none, but they at least had one good point that the restraint systems of the 1950s weren’t good enough.
The organization also conceded that there were situations in which a seatbelt was more than effective, such as the crashes described by CHP. But then the organization also noted that people crashing their cars don’t really get to choose the crash they’re getting into.
Thankfully, Motor Vehicle Research and Mr. White weren’t just complaining about seatbelts, but trying to find a solution. The organization’s suggestion was that belts were needed to distribute crash forces around less vulnerable parts of the body. This was echoed by the findings of the famous United States Air Force Colonel and human crash test dummy John Stapp. Motor Vehicle Research continued, saying that just having a good seatbelt also wasn’t good enough since the human body could only brace so much for an impact, anyway. Ideally, the whole car should be built around keeping you safe.
Safety Did Get Better
A piece of what Motor Vehicle Research was looking for happened in 1959 when engineer Nils Bohlin developed the three-point seatbelt for Volvo. Not long after, all Volvo cars came with three-point belts, and the invention was made available to the rest of the car industry. In 1968, Title 49 of the United States Code, Chapter 301, Motor Safety Standard mandated that all new cars came with three-point belts.
This sparked further nationwide debates, which got really heated and bizarre in the 1980s. Some people thought seatbelts took away their freedom while others said they would intentionally drive the long way around to avoid jurisdictions with seatbelt laws. Check out this segment from NBC in 1984:
In 1986, someone wrote to the New York Times, saying: “To satisfy American juridical principles, its proponents have come up with fantastic explanations why one person not wearing a seat belt is somehow a threat to others, including the ‘human missile’ argument, wherein it is alleged that in a car collision an unbelted occupant becomes a projectile threatening harm to others inside the car, thereby violating their rights.”
The piece continues:
Not to be outdone, along comes James A. Attwood (Op-Ed, Feb. 1) with a new tack: only prudent, idealistic human beings wear seat belts; only careless, irresponsible people do not. Think of it. For thousands of years mankind’s greatest philosophers have been trying to explicate the essence of good and evil. And now, we have the key to morality: seat belts are the answer, the ”sure sign,” as Mr. Attwood puts it!
This cheap, guilt-inducing act of moral intimidation is being offered to cover up the ugly reality that a mandatory-seat-belt law violates the right to bodily privacy and self-control of every front-seat occupant in every motor vehicle driving on the roads of New York State. Once they treat adults in this coercive, demeaning manner, how dare the advocates of such a law talk about ”responsibility”?”
That opinion was boldly titled “Seat-Belt Laws Violate Your Civil Rights.”
Today, some people still don’t wear seatbelts. According to IIHS, just 92 percent of drivers, 90 percent of front passengers, and 82 percent of rear passengers wear belts today.
Bohlin’s work paved the way for the modern restraint system, which means that the people of today can survive crashes that might have killed someone in the past. It would take until 1994 for all states to adopt a seatbelt law of some kind and even then, New Hampshire still doesn’t require adults to wear belts.
Today, research shows that belts do work. From the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: “For drivers and front-seat passengers, using a lap and shoulder belt reduces the risk of fatal injury by 60% in an SUV, van or pickup and by 45% in a car. Although the vast majority of people buckle up, there are still some who refuse or forget. Nearly half of people who die in crashes are not belted.”
Those numbers quoted by IIHS aren’t seatbelts alone. Today’s seatbelts have limiting systems to reduce the force subjected to an occupant in a crash. This technology combines with airbags, robust crumple zones, safety cages, specially designed seats, and other safety elements to keep you safe.
But this wasn’t the case in the 1950s. As demonstrated by MotorTrend‘s piece, vintage seatbelts did save some lives but might have compromised some others. It really was a bit of a Wild West. Thankfully, decades of research, science, and development have made driving so much safer than it used to be.
Top graphic images: Motor Trend; Ford
The constant chiming gets annoying driving around slowly (less than 15) on trails with my truck. The fix is to buckle it behind your back, then buckle up when back on the streets.
I’m shocked though in modern times with people knowing the seatbelts save lives, I often see people not buckled in and that awful feet on the dash thing. Even worse when they’re not wearing shoes. yuk
Why unbuckle on the trail? Isn’t the fix for constant chiming just to buckle the belt around yourself, as intended?
Getting in and out constantly etc. I’m gonna buy an old Durango like I used to have. It was great for all that with no nannies
Fix Or Repair Daily seatbelts? That’s when you find out Found On Road Dead has multiple meanings…it’s like for so long one of my favorite jokes was “good thing Ford doesn’t make airplanes! Ha ha” and then found out they actually used to (Ford Trimotor) and thought that was so hilarious
Very interesting and well researched article!
Now do one on people riding with their feet up on the dash
One of the 20/20 episodes in the mid-1980s highlighted the danger of lap seat belts, commonly fitted to the rear passengers and to the passengers in the middle of front bench seats.
A journalist interviewed a representative from the Swedish government agency on the automobile safety regulations. He was laughing so hard when presented the lap seat belts and said paraphasingly, “THEY ARE NOT EVEN SAFETY EQUIPMENT!”
Another one was assembling four survivors of severe car accident as to represent where they sat in the car prior to the accident: the driver and front passenger were sitting on two chairs in the front and had no life-changing injuries. Their two friends in the rear bench seat were sitting on their own wheelchairs. Guess what the rear passengers used: lap seat belts. The collision caused their upper bodies to slam against the back of the front seats, snapping their spines beyond recovery.
Shortly after this episode was aired, the Big Three and some foreign car manufacturers rushed to fit the three-point seat belts for the rear passengers as standard.
True story: my mom, who trained as a nurse, was very pro-seatbelt. My dad was not. My mom won when it came to us kids.
Then, my dad was a passenger in a relatively minor collision. Because he wasn’t wearing a belt, he hit the windshield pretty hard.
After that, he became a believer in seatbelts. Something about your wife having to dig glass shards out of your forehead for hours afterward tends to do that.
To this day, he continues to have neck issues from that accident. A reminder of his stubbornness.
Years later, when I was a teen, I was a passenger in a nasty rollover in which our truck left paint 6 feet up on a light pole. I walked away uninjured due to my seatbelt. The driver cracked some ribs, but also walked away because he was belted.
So your dad literally has a stiff neck, which was caused by his stiff neck.
The whole “(item intended for safety) is taking away my freedom” is so stupid. We as a nation deserve everything we get for being so fucking dumb.
Except the message sunk in, eventually, according to the stats in the article.
Maybe the way to put it is we’re not as swift in the uptake as we should be.
We are well along in this process; I will refer you to our entire political system and the dismantling of the rule of law as exhibits A and B.
To take that perspective as black and white is stupid. “We have installed speed limiters in your car for your safety” so you can never speed again, because speeding is not safe. Is that touching on freedoms? “We have taken bacon off the market because the fats will kill you”. Is that touching on freedoms?
Mandated safety DOES reduce freedom. Every single law reduces individual freedoms, for an expected greater good to society. There must be balance between those two aspects. But governments can easily tread on your freedoms and use the excuse of safety to remove all kinds of things from a society.
I understand your point. Education is the key. Many don’t have the common sense or knowledge to understand what is done in the interest of true safety and what is really an over reach. An educated populace should be able to distinguish between those two. (knock on wood)
Dad put seatbelts in our ’64 F100 Coach-built crewcab as soon as he got it in ’65. One of the first things I did to my ’67 VW squareback was to install not only 3-point seat belts, but later highback seats for safety reasons. The ’67 year had the 3-point attach points, so it was an easy upgrade.
To find a magazine article on any given topic, refer to the reader’s guide to periodical literature. It’s an annually released index of magazine articles that we used to use for research back before the internet that might not be so well known now. You can find it at your local library.
I was just going to say that someone needs to make a digital, searchable guide like this. For car magazines, at least.
I remember the debates back when they were looking at mandatory seat belt laws in Arizona. Even though I didn’t know much about how effective they are, it seemed obvious that the only reason people were objecting to this were because someone was telling them they’d have to do it. Here’s an idea: Start up a conspiracy theory that the nanobodies Bill Gates has introduced into the municipal water systems need your eyes to be clear so that they can see everything you do. Give that a year or so to percolate and then promote a law that makes it illegal to stab yourself in the eyes.Get Anthony Fauci to back it See how many nutjobs end up blind.
We had a ’65 Chevelle Malibu at one point, I did some digging like I do on all my old stuff, my favorite tidbit was that if you chose to go without seat belts Chevy would actually give you money back on your purchase price. I think it was like $4/belt if I remember correctly.
I remember my mom telling me that the Galaxie 500 her father ordered 1964 didn’t have rear seatbelts because they would have cost extra.
There are many times when heading out to lunch with coworkers that I’m the only one to immediately reach for a seatbelt when getting in the car. This is always a source for comment – often bordering on ridicule – until I remind everyone of what traffic has been like since the new roundabouts were opened.
On the other extreme, my grandfather bought a Beetle for my dad and uncle to share in high school, the first thing he did after picking it up from the dealer was drive it over to the Navy base and have the aircraft mechanics fit seat belts into it.
They never crashed it, exactly, so I don’t know how well the installation worked, but my uncle eventually destroyed it while dad was away in Vietnam, mainly by extensive off roading, driving through creeks, and making ridiculously futile efforts at drag racing
Putting on a seat belt has bene very automatic for most of the population for decades. Yet rural populations seem to lead not wearing them. I think this is because there are using using farm equipment that doesn’t have seatbelts or they get int the way of the operation of the equipment. Those same people operate tractor trailers for their farming and same thought processes. And it’s relatively easy to get in the habit of either. For instance I now find myself trying to press the auto stop start button on any car I get into just because I have to press it in my stupidest car when I start it or it will behave in a terrible unsafe manner.
Tractors and lawn tractors make an interesting point of reference as the Small lawn tractors offer no rollover protection and no seatbelts as they are small enough you thow yourself in the other direction if you are flipping it over. Kind of sounds insane in this day in age. While anything bigger offers some kind of rollover protection even with an open station and a seat belt. And I’ve seen that seat belt keep people from getting killed when a tractor does roll over but there is still a thought process to put that on unless you are in the habit if you are on flat ground most operators probably wouldn’t buckle up. But if you know your roll over risks you remember to buckle when going up hills or uneven ground.
I guess there is the whole atv vs side by side vs mule / utv. Or even golf carts. The mule is a side by side but more for utility then sport and i would bet most people don’t buckle up but in a side by side you do. Golf carts for their original intended purpose don’t have seatbelts but most jurisdictions that allow their steet use require them to have seatbelts and turn signals.
First of all, I always wear my belt – always…..
Second, not all 3pt seatbelts work as intended. In 74 I was driving a new Audi Fox to work, a guy pulled out in front of me at about 45 mph, he was at a slight angle to me as he was tuning left and I hit the left front corner of his giant Buick dead center of my grill. I rolled out of the shoulder part of the belt and hit the rear view mirror with my head, my right knee hit the dash pretty hard. No airbags back then but I would have been out of position for it to do any good anyway.
Point being, that belts are particularly good in a straight ahead collision, not as much when there are angles involved. Even so, always wear your belt!
I always wear a seatbelt, but the overactive ones in my ’86 that clamp down when I merely lean out to the mailbox and can’t be easily relaxed has me reconsidering it and I’m someone who had no complaints about motorized belts.
My father was saved by not wearing a seatbelt. He tried to kill himself by driving off a mountain highway and the car went several hundred yards into the woods where its progress was arrested by a tree. He ended up in the passenger footwell and the engine took his spot in the driver’s seat. He still might have died of exposure, but a bear hunter stumbled across him, so all he managed to kill was an Opel GT.
My family’s first seat belts were for the (2-cycle) SAAB they bought (back when that was our area’s alternative to VW, a local boat dealer had gotten a franchise). Diagonal only, no lap belt. SAAB literature gave some justification for that choice, but I don’t remember what it was. Must have been late 1950s.
My Zap Xebra also had shoulder belts without lap belts. As a three-wheeler it was exempt from quite a few safety regulations, in that it was legally a motorcycle, but this still seemed like an odd choice to make for the belts, especially for 2007.
Today I learned that Zap Xebra exists !