"Picture this: You get into your car, close the door, and suddenly a motorized belt starts moving across your body like some kind of automotive snake. These automatic seatbelts were supposed to save lives by ensuring everyone buckled up, but they mostly just scared the hell out of passengers and occasionally clotheslined unsuspecting drivers. The system was simple in theory. When you opened the door, the shoulder belt would slide forward along a track. When you closed it, the belt would slide back into position."
"Cars from the 70s and 80s were like the wild west of automotive design. Engineers were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, and boy, did some weird stuff stick around for a while. As someone who grew up hearing these stories at family dinners and later experienced some of these features firsthand in beat-up hand-me-downs, I can tell you that driving back then was a completely different beast."
Cars of the 1970s and 1980s featured many experimental and eclectic designs that prioritized novelty over modern safety and usability. Drivers encountered motorized conveniences like shoulder belts that moved on tracks and sometimes malfunctioned, trapping or startling occupants. Regulatory pressure in the early 1990s forced manufacturers to adopt either automatic belts or airbags, and many chose the cheaper mechanical systems despite reliability issues. Those features often appear primitive, hazardous, or amusing today, yet they influenced how a generation perceived driving and informed later safety and design developments.
Read at Silicon Canals
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