Some People Hated Seatbelts In The 1950s And They Actually Had A Good Reason

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