My favorite genre, by far.
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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
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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
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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.
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I miss you automatic bucklers. RIP.
My Camry had this! I haven’t thought about that in forever!
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I miss you automatic bucklers. RIP.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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..
