commentary on my paper -- seatbelts

No, I am not attempting to pad my blog with the same topic as my paper; I do want to comment more informally on a topic that I could have written a much more about. One thing that I kept thinking about while I was writing my paper was a comment in one of my sources about car seats. I cannot remember the comment, but I started thinking about my own car seat from childhood. I had a car seat made from a hard molded plastic seat; with a black vinyl padded insert (for my comfort) it had a racing style harness with a metal buckle. The bar that came down over my head and locked into place was metal tubing with a black vinyl pad in the center that went across my lap. In today’s world, that thing would have been scrapped before it made it off the drawing board. The thing that made matters worse was that we lived in Arizona. So picture hot Arizona summer, black vinyl, metal bar, and little boy. I didn’t have to touch a hot stove to get burned; I just had to go for a ride in the car.

Now back to seat belts. I would like to make the comment that I don’t feel that the auto companies were completely out in left field when they made claims that the public didn’t want (or I think more appropriately didn’t care) seat belts in their cars. I think this is evidenced by the apparent disregard for their use today. We the American public feel that seatbelts are not important enough to always use. It constantly amazes me when I ride with someone and the driver will not put on a seat belt. He even tries to fool the computer on his new vehicle into thinking the seatbelt is attached by clicking the latch button. Yet this same person makes his children put on seat belts when they ride in the vehicle with him. It is precisely this type of attitude that has forced the government to regulate the industry with airbags. Since we won’t use seat belts, all cars now have passive restraints to help in the event of a crash since we are unwilling to be active about restraints. And we wonder and complain about the costs of cars – all this safety is expensive. One great gadget is the new adaptive cruise control. Basically it is cruise control with forward looking radar that can sense a change in an object’s distance from the car and apply the brakes to avoid colliding. It is a little sad when you think that one of the sources for the development of this technology are drivers that are not competent enough to use the existing cruise control systems.

What I am trying to get at here is that if we as drivers were more concerned and more competent, then some of the regulated ‘features’ on vehicles might not be required, possibly lowering the overall vehicle cost of buying a car.