I miss you automatic bucklers. RIP.
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.
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…
This is still a thing in any community that needs helmets and/or elbow and knee pads.
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/
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.
I recently got one of the cars pictured. These belts are junk but it sure was cool.
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…
My Camry had this! I haven’t thought about that in forever!
Shout-out or throwback?
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.
