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
Yip, my dad was a cop and I remember him pouring over a Volvo with three point belts — would have been early 1970s.
Shortly afterwards our seatbelt less Morris Traveler was replaced with a (front only) three point belted new DS 21.
Stupid argument of the time was that wearing seatbelts would invevitably lead to belted occupants not being able to get out of the car when stuck on train tracks at a level crossing, or being burnt to horrific death because the straps kept them prisoner in burning cars…
My dad protected us and never told us things he saw — I later heard another cop tell how he had to spend about three hours looking for the body of a driver, not wearing a seatbelt who was thrown from the car in an accident. Was found “in bits” in shrubs 100 metres from the car.
I have a recollection of reading somewhere in the ’70s during one of the standard debates of the time that the ratio of advantage/disadvantage for lap belts in a crash was 6/1, meaning that in one-sixth of wrecks the occupants would have been better-off without the belt. Obvious common sense aside, that was enough to provide plenty of anecdotal ammunition for the anti-belters and you’d never hear the end of it. In my case at around 20 y.o. I had the luck of being in two front-end crashes within a few months, one as a passenger and the other being a conflict between myself and a guardrail; in the former case the supposed race car in progress had no belts installed yet and as I saw the collision coming I readied myself for something like a football block and got shaken up but was fine, in the second case the shoulder belt retract mechanism caught under deceleration as it was designed to and preventing me from leaning forward, causing my neck to snap at the impact and leaving me in pain for about a year. So in my particular experience I was or would-have-been better off without the belts, at-least those two times. However, as a younger child I had witnessed the immediate aftermath of a partial eject in an intersection, basically an old truck on its side with a body inside but a head outside the roof edge in the middle of a large pool of blood, and there was that.
Other stories; as a kid I once swapped seats into the front of a Mooney private plane, forgot to buckle up, and was handed the controls which I immediately pushed forward on and the next thing I knew I was floating toward the ceiling while being severely yelled at by the actual pilot and that was the end of that flying lesson. My first car was a Nova with a bench seat and if you did something like take an abrupt turn you would slide across and be left holding onto the steering wheel to stay in place which might further influence the direction of the car and so as with the aircraft, buckling up tight was necessary just to be able to operate the vehicle.
I once I had a kid who for a while would refuse seat belts (?!) and we’d just have to sit there not going anywhere until she put that belt on, or back on if she’d slipped it off. Some people just don’t like them and I guess that’s what it still comes down to after all this time.
The 6/1 argument against seat belts is similar to motorcyclists who argue against helmets when that’s a 99/1 argument.
My “I need to just walk away from this” debate on helmets came when someone at a party told me he didn’t wear a helmet because he couldn’t hear… things? First, I’ve ridden without a helmet and you can’t hear a fucking thing with the wind. Second, I don’t know what he thought he would be able to hear that would save his life. Horns and emergency vehicles are still plenty loud with a helmet.
The other great invention was the collapseable steering column. If you look at the old driver safety films on YouTube you’ll see where the driver was impaled by the steering wheel. I’d rather have my ribs broken than turned into a human shish kebab.
I was a kid in the 60’s where not all cars you road in would have belts. I wasn’t against them myself, but it wasn’t a thing I always did. In any event, I was driving when I was broadsided. When I came to in the car, I was now sitting in the middle, and my seat was crumpled under the door. I’m certain my pelvis would have been crushed if I had been wearing a belt. For years after that, I would not wear a belt when driving around town, although I’d wear one when out on the highway. So there’s an anecdote that says “seat belts are bad.”
Eventually I came to the realization that seat belts, like most safety items, are basically playing the odds. Sometimes they’ll help; other times not. But they are more likely to be a benefit. I now wear them religiously.
Something I didn’t know until recently, thanks to a guy who does kinda shady things: there is a market for going to the junkyard, clipping out the part of the seatbelt that clips in and keeps the “Hey dummy you don’t have your seatbelt on” chime from going off.
Personally I’ve had two accidents that resulted in totaled vehicles and the 3 point seatbelt saved me. Both green cars, so I don’t buy green cars any more. One of the totaled cars was a Renault Alliance, and if the seatbelt worked in that car it should work in any car.
It’s worse than that, search for “seat belt buckle alarm stopper.”
There is one legitimate use for these, and that’s if you’re driving on a frozen river or lake. You need to not be belted in on the off chance the vehicle breaks through the ice, and that buzzer can get really annoying if you’ve got a long drive out to your icehouse/ice hole.
I’m guessing way more of these get sold than there are ice fishermen, though.
My high school auto-safety story is that one of the kids I knew had a paralyzed right arm from having fallen out of the back of a pickup truck when he was younger. It was all limp and atrophied and he kept the hand in his pocket as an alternative to wearing a permanent sling or letting it flop around.
He was making some sweet lemonade from those lemons at the time – star of the soccer team (in a school whose football team sucked) – but part of the reason why was that he focused on the one sport year-round before anyone else because it was the only one he could play on a non-adaptive level (adaptive sports not really existing yet in the early ’90s).
My grandfather was an early proponent of seatbelts. Every time he got in the driver’s seat he’d first open up the glove compartment, remove a pint of rye, take a belt, then return the bottle and drive off. He survived quite a few accidents.
I ride motorcycles, but I won’t even change spaces in a parking lot without buckling up in a closed cell car.
You do know that Motor Trend is fully digitized online, for free, right? (And, not just on archive.org?)
HERE‘s the link.
Wow. News to me, thanks!
Also, I didn’t realize gymkhana wasn’t a recently invented or adopted term in the automotive world. The very first issue of MotorTrend, September 1949, has a report about a Los Angeles gymkhana hosted by the “Foreign Car Group” of LA.
It’s very relaxing to page through these old scans.
You’re my hero of the day! ♥
I’ve been paying some weird 3rd party provider for access to MT’s archives. I also just buy up whatever old paper magazines I find while going to flea markets with my wife. Knowing that I can read MT for free is going to save me some money. Thanks!
Only an absolute fool wouldn’t wear their seatbelt. It has always been second nature to me, and I’ve never found them to be a burden, or uncomfortable. However, I do tend to agree with the New Hampshire mindset. If I’m the sole occupant of the car, posing no danger to others, what gives them the right to ticket me? My own well-being? And no, I don’t buy the whole “public cost/burden” angle if I was to be severely injured in an accident due to my own stupidity. Might as well ban motorcycles, or bicycles, or sidewalks.
Live Free Or Die….literally
Live Free And Die
That ticket isn’t just for your safety. It’s also to let the insurance companies know you are a habitual seat belt denier so they may adjust your rates accordingly.
https://www.progressive.com/answers/does-a-seatbelt-ticket-affect-insurance/
“Might as well ban motorcycles, or bicycles, or sidewalks.”
I dunno about where you live but bikes and motorcycle helmets are mandatory for children and everyone respectively here in California. They are optional for sidewalks.
My crash nightmare is being partially ejected through the windshield. Head and shoulders through the windshield, arms pinned to your sides because you didn’t get thrown all the way through. And you can’t break free on your own because the plastic layers in the laminated safety glass are doing their job holding everything together. Pretty much any partial ejection through the windshield is almost unimaginably bad.
Yeah, I’m fine with wearing seat belts.
A year or two after my high school graduation, a classmate of mine died after being partially ejected through the sun roof and then the car continued rolling and crushed her. She wasn’t wearing the seatbelt, of course. I wasn’t around for the funeral, but if I recall correctly it was closed casket.
I was pretty good about wearing seatbelts before that, but that event made me wear them religiously.
Rest in peace Pam. You’ve saved me from a couple of major injuries over the years.
A girl my younger sister knew in high school wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and went through a Trans Am’s T-top to get decapitated by an overhead traffic light when the driver was racing another idiot in a Mustang and t-boned a truck. Pretty rough. Driver was wearing a seatbelt and was more or less fine. Guy in the truck was fine, too . . . at least physically.
The fact that the insurance companies were giving discounts for seat belts is very telling. All the insurance company cares about it reducing claims, and they are voracious data consumers in pursuit of that goal.
Mom had a ’78 Malibu. I recall putting my hands and chin on the dashboard, knees on the floor, feet on the seat (aka knealing on the floor) while she drove. We were lucky back then.
This also reminds me that headrests in cars were mandated by 1968 but not in trucks until 1991. (dates may be close)
My mother made me put headrests in my 88 Mazda Pickup back in the early 90s. I quickly found a better option – I put a set of bucket seats from a Chrysler Conquest in it.
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I haven’t known anyone personally in the last three decades who doesn’t use seatbelts. Yet of all the fatal crashes in my local news, 3/4 weren’t wearing seatbelts.
This is such a consistent occurrence that I half wonder if seatbelts are coming loose in crashes. It’s not like they get tested regularly. But the reality is probably that there are a lot of dumb people out there.
My nieces and nephews back in central PA don’t wear seatbelts. My one niece has been in like 6 crashes (minor) and thinks she is safer without them (she is also the only one of the 7 to actually graduate high school the rest dropped out). They all also smoke and vote against their interest.
Who’s forcing them to vote for someone they don’t want to?
Nobody’s forcing them – the point is they choose to vote for somebody that doesn’t have their best interests at heart, resulting in easily predictable (to everyone else) negative outcomes for themselves that somehow surprise these voters.
I’m sure I could figure out a current example or two if I gave it a bit of thought.
People who do one dumb thing are likely to do others?
There are a couple of guys at my work who don’t. They are not smart men.
Any time I read about a car wreck in the paper, about half the time it seems like the driver is ticketed for driving w/o insurance/license or driving while suspended.
Always reminds me to have plenty of Uninsured PI/PD insurance coverage.
My dad’s first new car purchase was a white ’56 Ford convertible with the T-Bird engine. And he got the optional seat belts. I think his rationale was it was a convertible and the seat belts would keep you in the car in an accident with the top down. The seat belts themselves were black and worked fine, but had one major problem. They pulled through and had a metal lip at the end. They weren’t retractable. So, someone gets out of the passenger seat, the belt hangs out the door. It gets close and you drive off. The belt lip drags on the ground and gets deformed and now won’t go through the buckle. At 6 or 7 years old, I remember my dad taking a file to the metal lip so the seat built would work again.
“…even then, New Hampshire still doesn’t require adults to wear belts.“
Taking their state motto, “Live Free or Die” to a predictable outcome I suppose. Maybe it should be, “Live Free and Die.”
It’s more telling that we need a law at all. You would think self-preservation would get belt-wearing to the same 90% rate but I guess there’s always going to be 30% or so that doesn’t want to be told what to do.
“dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” is a bit of an eye-roller when applied to seatbelts, but the core concept is still there. Even if a behavior change has robust data to prove broad social benefit, there’s a nonzero portion of the voting population who says that’s not justification pass a new law (nevermind that most legislation is judged by its intent, rather than its results).
Put another way, “the best ideas don’t require force” but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever see 100% agreement.
I’m fairly libertarian-minded myself but never understood the resistance to seatbelts. At least the three-point variety in modern vehicles.
I agree the default position of always looking to make things illegal instead of using persuasion is something to be avoided generally. But when on the road, traveling at high rates of speed there should also be an expectation that we have everyone’s safety in mind when applying regulations. I always liked the argument that the seatbelt keeps you in place so that you are always in a position to have control over your vehicle in case of danger or accident. That control protects others to some degree.
It’s a balance, as always, between freedom and regulation but public roads are not the place for these battles in my humble opinion.
What you described is a strong argument in favor of speed limits with their high externality costs, but choosing not to use a seatbelt really doesn’t place much burden on society apart from health insurance inflation.
Perhaps but I’ve always thought the data on speed limits is a bit cherry-picked and sounds more like correlation rather than causation.
Speed combined with other risky behavior like abrupt lane changes etc can cause an accident where there are plenty of studies that say if you’re traveling significantly faster than traffic but in the left lane it isn’t statistically significant in the risk of danger. So I think the speed data point is often viewed in a vacuum and it may be for political reasons to support speed limits and revenue from speed limits.
However, I do think there are specific use cases for speed limits in residential or high density areas to control traffic, pedestrian safety etc.
When belts were first truly mainstream, I remember my dad’s ’81 Jetta still trying to be clever — it had a lap belt, but also a detachable piece (I will not reference King Missile) to serve as a shoulder belt.
The detachable piece connected onto the door frame and was a precursor to the motorized ones that some Japanese brands offered shortly thereafter. The idea was that if the shoulder harness was pre-fastened, you could just slide into the car and the act of shutting the door would get you halfway there. You just had to put on the lap belt.
Never mind how dumb it is to attach a seat belt to a door that can deform or detach from the car in a crash, I guess it was a step.
Thank you for the earworm.
Kind of nice to know that dishonest arguments are nothing new. I disagree with the article thesis that the nay-sayers had a good reason. I’m not going to say the old seat belts were “good” but it definitely falls in the “better than nothing” category. I don’t disagree that regulation was clearly needed and someone installing a seat belt that was untested and non-functional isn’t a good idea. But saying you’re better off without them because they may not work seems like a dishonest stretch to push your own agenda. The “thrown free” anecdote / argument will always sit poorly with me just like the similar argument that says people will be more reckless if they think they are safe and thus having no safety equipment is better because people will be more careful and have less accidents.
I’m glad the industry and regulators saw the value of the basic idea and then worked to address the issues and improve it rather than follow the haters and give up.
while light on peer-reviewed data, it does seem that early belts may have been beneficial in some cases while introducing new/extra bodily trauma in others. Tough to say that as of 1957 they were or were not a net benefit yet.
Yeah, the “I’m not against this in theory, but…” argument is such a common way to sound reasonable. The anti-vaxxers love it, too.
I can’t say whether early seatbelts were as obviously beneficial, but I’m immediately suspicious of an argument that starts as approval of a(n impossibly perfect) version of the idea in order to present disapproval of realistic application more effectively.
I immediately thought of anti-vaxxers when reading the justifications in the article. “I’m very pro [seat belts/vaccines] but I think we need to do more work to make sure they’re safe.”
Watching the video of those old men saying, “I just won’t wear one!” was wild to me. I was born in 1984 but my mom was an ER nurse so no one EVER road in our cars without a seat belt. I do remember some kids back then thought that was weird, but I haven’t driven with anyone as an adult who didn’t immediately buckle up. Just thought I would point out a positive shift in social norms (give the backsliding we seem to be doing in some areas!).
“my mom was an ER nurse so no one EVER road in our cars without a seat belt”
Margit Engellau wife of Volvo CEO Gunnar Engellau was also a nurse. She was a huge campaigner for Volvo’s safety campaign including better seat belts and headrests:
https://www.volvocars.com/us/news/safety/let-your-head-rest-in-the-safety-of-a-volvo-car/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iPgDgNtOouo
That’s the sort of work that really matters–seeing something isn’t good enough and making it better. Not campaigning against it because it’s imperfect. I’m glad she pushed better safety devices. Sounds like an amazing person.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing.
I wish the EX30 wasn’t a UX nightmare (or made in China), because I’d love a Volvo. 🙂
When my wife is taking her Mom (82) places, she still has to fuss at her to put on her seat belt before leaving.
Now that I think about it, my Dad (85) also gets a bit huffy when asked to put on his seat belt.
I’m in my late 40’s and I’ve always grown up wearing seatbelts and I still yell at my kids for not wearing theirs (of which 2/3 of them are adults themselves). After seeing enough wrecks in person, it’s obvious that they save lives. However, I still know a few people (call them luddites, curmudgeons, cranks or whatever) that simply refuse to wear them and no amount of convincing them (even showing them footage of crashes where a seatbelt would have saved a person’s life) that steadfastly refuse them. Oh well, if you want to win a Darwin award, that’s on you buddy.
I still see a number of people driving around with their kids obviously not strapped in. I live in a lower economic area…many of them are not into following the rules.
A long deceased relative got pulled over for not wearing a seat belt when New York was phasing in mandatory seatbelt laws. They were already well into retirement at that point and had been driving since the late 1920’s. This relative didn’t like change but liked keeping their money even more after living through the Great Depression and WWII. They ultimately did change after a few more traffic stops, if only to keep from being hassled.
I have two old cars. A 1955 Mercury and 1949 Plymouth. Both have lap belts. I would NOT want to get in a wreck in either. Because whats in front are solid steel dashes and large steering wheels. That’s what people were hitting their heads on and it probably wasn’t exactly pretty.
The abysmal safety of the 1955 models is probably why Ford introduced their Lifeguard safety package in 1956 which included padded dashboards and seat belts as an option:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeguard_(automobile_safety)
Driving an old car definitely helps one contextualize arguments against seatbelts back in the day. My 1968 Olds has shoulder belts in addition to its lap belt. The should belts don’t retract. They fold up and mount to the ceiling. To use them, you unfurl it from the ceiling and buckle it into an additional buckle on the floor, then adjust like in an airplane. Once you’ve buckled up, you’re not leaning forward anymore. If you want to use them, make sure you’ve released your parking brake first, otherwise you’ll have to unbuckle in order to do that. I think silly inconveniences like that turned a lot of people off of those shoulder belts until we got the conventional ones we have today.
Also – this still trips me up – I remember asking my mechanic about how hard it would be to add seatbelts to the back seat so I could feel a little safer having my kids in the car. He insisted they were already there. He explained that everyone back then would just roll the rear seatbelts up and shove them under the seat cushion never to be seen again. We pulled the cushion and there they were. Out of hiding after decades.
Grew up in various late 60s/early 70s GM cars in the same situation. Spent most of my time on the center armrest with the adult arm restraint (whereby the arm….which was likely to be the one holding the omnipresent cigar or cigarette – since the ashtray and lighter were at my feet – would be flung out in a vain attempt to prevent little Gaston from doing his best Superman impression) as an ‘active safety feature’. Of course if it was summer, windows were all the way down so we all would have done the Superman thing under the right circumstances. Thankfully my father was a mailman and had to learn defensive driving.
Since they were common on newer cars but attached with the lap belt, I never understood how those shoulder belts worked. I guess the additional clips were shoved under the seat with the ones for the lap belts.
I regularly drive my Brother-in-Law’s ’68 Cougar to keep it up. Always feels weird with only lap belt and low back seats.
Had a close call last year on way to work in Cougar. Guy on his phone in a Dodge truck completely veered into my lane on a curve. I miraculously avoided serious injury/death taking an excursion through the ditch. Didnt even have time to lay on the horn. Not sure he ever noticed me. Time I got back on road and turned around, he was long gone. Probably a good thing. I was beyond livid.
My first car that I had from 16-19 years old was a 1969 Galaxie and I got it from my Grandmother in 1985. She bought it new. It had a lab belt and a separate shoulder belt that hung from the roof. I never used that as it was fixed length and did not allow me to lean forward to see right or left at intersections. I am glad I never crashed bad enough to test the belts. Of course my second car was a 1978 VW rabbit with just a shoulder belt attached to the door and no lap belt. That had an ignition kill feature if the belt was unclipped from the door. I am a happy driver with nice new 3 point belts in every car since (well not every, once I did buy a 70 galaxie convertible but it did not live long).
Those sort of fixed roof shoulder belts are interesting. I wear one of those in the trainer Cessna and it feels like it would be very painful if I were to ever crash the thing. So I sort of treat it as a warning. If I want my collarbone I better not crash. lol
Sounds like a softer version of Tullock’s Spike for aviation!
Ages ago I totaled the family ’71 Impala while wearing the non adjustable, hang it on the ceiling, fasten it separately, forget about reaching the radio belt. It’s why I still have my original face shape. Ditto a few years later when a kid came to a near complete stop when he tried to shift into second while suddenly hanging a left in front of me on a state highway. T-boned his truck hard enough to make the opposite door hard to open and put a briefcase through the dashboard of my boss’s car, but I barely felt the bruise on my shoulder. Nevertheless, striving to miss is the better answer.
The ’70 GTO my mom had was the same way – I don’t think I ever saw the shoulder belts used, and when I was old enough to drive it myself I found that it was perfectly engineered to fit EVERYONE badly no matter what body size/shape they had.
Good lord, I think I remember reading the reason they outlawed those auto shoulder belts in ’80s early ’90s cars was that if you didn’t manually fasten the lap belt it really was more dangerous than no belt at all. Crazy that’s all it had in your golf.
the motorized door seatbelts were easy to get stuck in if you tried to get out of your car too fast. they sucked.
Yeh so glad they’re gone, I had an ’89 Mazda with them and hated them.
Yes! I specifically remember seeing some kind of graphic or animation showing how easily a child could just slide out from under the shoulder belt with no lap belt. I hated those motorized seatbelts anyway because the angle meant the belt would be dragged across my face.
Yeh they were terrible