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| 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme |
By Aaron Robinson - from Car and Driver
What I remember most about Dad’s 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme is the aroma of stale plastic, the coal smudge on the ceiling from his cigar smoke, the one mismatched Buick hubcap, and the dangling, twisted vines of seatbelts that were hardly ever used. Motivated, I think, by the highway-safety films shown in health class, we kids needled Dad to buckle up. He relented after the auto industry started packing his steering wheel with explosives. In retrospect, perhaps we needn’t have bothered.
What I remember most about Dad’s 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme is the aroma of stale plastic, the coal smudge on the ceiling from his cigar smoke, the one mismatched Buick hubcap, and the dangling, twisted vines of seatbelts that were hardly ever used. Motivated, I think, by the highway-safety films shown in health class, we kids needled Dad to buckle up. He relented after the auto industry started packing his steering wheel with explosives. In retrospect, perhaps we needn’t have bothered.
No seatbelt could have saved Dad from the cancer, as it turned out. And the government has long been on the side of the unbelted. For more than 30 years, it has forced the auto industry to design cars around drivers who don’t worry enough about making widows out of their spouses, orphans out of their children, or devastated mourners out of their parents to buckle up.
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208 requires all cars to be equipped with a “passive restraint,” or some kind of crash-safety system that doesn’t require the occupants to do anything other than gas up the car and make the loan payments. Remember motorized seatbelts? Those were passive restraints. So were the first airbags, which replaced motorized belts and were, in turn, replaced by “smart” airbags with occupant-position sensors and variable deployment rates so that fewer people would be killed by their vehicles’ passive restraints.
Buzzers or chimes are supposed to drive you mad until you don the seatbelt, right?
Actually, a sampling of test cars in our lot showed that most alarms go silent within a minute or two of startup or the car being moved. A check of the law reveals that seatbelt warnings need only sound for eight seconds to pass government muster. Years ago, the industry devised interlocks in response to NHTSA requirements to prevent cars from being started until the belts were buckled—and Congress banned them.
Legislatures in 49 states have made it illegal to drive unbelted, which helps explain why the latest transportation department survey, conducted in 2010, concludes that 85 percent of occupants are clicked in, the highest percentage since the survey began in 1994. Yet the federal register is full of paeans to the unbelted.
The U.S. is the only major automobile market that sets crash standards for unbelted occupants. The safety testing in Europe, for example, assumes that if you’re capable of obtaining a license (via driver-training systems far more rigorous and expensive than ours), then you’re not too lazy or too obtuse or too stubborn to put on a seatbelt. Many fascinating vehicles aren’t sold here because they won’t pass a seatbelt-free crash test.
To give unbelted duffs a chance at survival in a head-on, vehicle structures must be larger and heavier to crush slower, so airbags have enough time to inflate and catch the hurtling bodies. And interior surfaces must be softer and thicker to cushion the impact of flying heads and limbs. Why does a two-seat, aluminum-bodied Ferrari 458 Italia weigh 3451 pounds? Here is one reason.
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