Automatic Safety

Automatic or passive seat belts, the great compromise between automakers and the United States government. Passive seat belts were one of those “safety” products that cause more harm than good for the end user. It was much hated by consumers and led to them only having a short life from 1990 to 1995. Now why were these seat belts a thing in the first place?

Well the passive seat belts were invented by Volkswagen in 1972 and was first used in the Volkswagen Golf in 1975. This lead the Brock Adam, the United States Secretary of Transportation, to mandated that every car in to have either automatic seat belts or airbags by 1983. Now this angered many lobbyist who thought this was a way too soon of a deadline. In 1981 the mandate was dropped then transferred to the Supreme Court which lead to the mandate to stay, but now with an extended deadline of 1990. Now airbags were still a relatively new system which meant it was pretty expensive. Thus many car companies decided to go with passive seat belts since it was the cheaper option. Now why was this mandated purposed in the first place? Well because people never wear their seat belts, so the government view of this was if people did not wear seat belts on their of accord, then have the car do it for them. Plus in 1978 it was showed that passive seat belts fatality rate was .78 per 100 million miles compared with manual seat belts 2.34 per 100 million miles.

The most common form of automatic seat belts is the one which travels along the door frame. How this works is that once the driver is in the seat and turns the car on, the shoulder belt would whirrrr from the bottom of the A pillar on the car, all along the door frame and to the resting position on the middle of the B pillar. The reverse process would happen when the door would be open or the engine shut off. There would be a control module (mostly located under the passenger seat) that controls the motor and switches on these passive seat belts. The fault of these automatic seat belts is that there was a manual lap belt that HAS TO BE WORN alongside with the automatic shoulder belt. Most would think that they are safe with just the shoulder belt, which is completely false. This is highly dangerous because in an event of a crash, depending on speed, the lack of a lap belt would cause the occupant to either slide up and out of their seat or hit their head against the roof, or worse get strangled or even worse get decapitated by the belt.  

As you can see the passive seat belts did not attract many fans. A lot of people find the belts annoying and frustrating. Many consumers found that cars that had passive seat belts instead of airbags as an major turn off. Since it is one more component to break, when they broke many people leave them broken, causing even more of a risk. The biggest problem, for me anyways, is that why have an automatic seat belt system if you still have to manually put on the lap belt. This makes the whole thing redundant and better off with having a regular three point seat belt, at least that does not chop your head off. If worn correctly, passive seat belts are great at its job of protecting its occupants even though they are quite redundant. Plus they make a great party trick.   

A Demo of the seat belts in action in a 1991Toyota Corolla

source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt