According to Gramps: Seatbelts

According to my only living great grandfather, while growing up in the 1950's, he had only used seat belts while riding in a passenger airliner. At that time even race car drivers didn't use seat belts, not even roll bars.

That must have begun to change when Bill Vukovich died in the Indianapolis Memorial Day Race. He remember the pictures of Vukovich's overturned car with only a hand visible from under the car. I googled Vukovich hand. I clicked on images, and I saw a photograph of the hand

The first cars in which he remembers using seat belts must have been Air Force military cars and trucks, and, of course, also airplanes in the mid 1960's.

Recently I watched a movie, Mulholland Falls, with Nick Nolte as a tough, Los Angeles police police officer who intimidates out-of-town gangsters in an an attempt to make them leave town. It must seem like an unlikely plot, but Gramps says that he has heard police officers brag about how they do that sort of thing. For example, Gilbert Ortega, former police chief of Phoenix, Arizona used traffic enforcement to stop and delay mobsters as they drove from the airport to their destination in Phoenix.

But I digress.

Noltle drives what appears to be a 1949 Buick Roadmaster, which sets the movie in the early 1950's. Near the end of the movie Nolte and three other actors ride in a Dakota type aircraft (Civilian DC-3, Military C-47) (Shirley Temple called it the Good Ship Lollipop)

In the aircraft, Nolte and the other actors do not use seat belts. I might have found that odd, but Gramps says that he did ride one time in a C-47 which did not have seat belts. The plane was a Philippine Air Force aircraft on a flight from Manila Airport to Lubang International Airport, also in the Philippines. He had flown from Clark Air Base to Lubang in American Air Force C-47's, and they had seat belts. Sometimes they even had parachutes. Philippine Airlines used the DC-3 version of the plane and they had seat belts.

So, not having seat belts made him nervous, but they made the trip without incident.

Lubang Island has an interesting history. A Japanese straggler lived there for thirty years after World War Two, but that is another story.

My first car was a '66 Ford LTD - big bench seats front and back
Early 80's, seat belts weren't mandatory, and I don't think it had a shoulder harness.

Early winter snow + unplowed parking lot = DONUT TIME!!!

Well, I started spinning the wrong way and I slid right across the seat, trying to hang on to the wheel. Nothing bad happened but it was a lesson in physics for me.

I was an "early adopter" to wearing seat belts all the time. I now feel uncomfortable, or kind of naked without one - even as a passenger in the backseat.

I've never been in a moving car without a seat belt and a shoulder strap. I don't think of them as two things. For me, they are just s seat belt.

Also, I know that seat belts are a relatively new item in cars because in old movies, no one wears seat belts.

I do not like them myself but I do understand that for the most part they do save lives & lessen injuries!

before seatbelts, I when I was a kid riding on the top of the car. my parents used ropes around my waist that really uncomfortable.

so my teens, my parents get seatbelt fasten it to the roof of the car. since, it is much comfortable to ride on the roof. I like sing " the wind beneath my wings " , I feel like I am flying on the roof.

If memory serves, in the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks was in a cargo plan and wasn't wearing his seat belt...I don't think there was a seat belt.

The plane goes down in a storm.

Hanks grabs on to some cargo netting or some such thing.

Of the people on the plane (flight crew & Hanks), Hanks is the only one to survive.

Perhaps we could use this movie scene to argue against seatbelt.

or, we argue they more volleyball games in cargo bays on planes.

Realistically I think you could probably argue anything you like but whether it would go anywhere is another matter completely!!
Seriously I would like to know why in the USA we have plastic lenses on headlights? safety & visibility wise after they cloud over they really suck!! Being America I guess its down to cost (of course) then if the customer wants new clear ones they have to pay. Perhaps if a manufacturer was sued (like everyone gets sued here sometimes for stupid stuff) it might encourage them to improve things!!