Carl F. Thelin

MOUSE BELTS

Many of my cases alleged that the auto companies failed to provide air bag crash protection earlier than they could have and should have. The alleged motives for the delay were many. Plaintiffs in these cases claimed that the passenger injuries would have been less severe if the subject vehicle had airbags. They sat that the failure to provide automatic crash protection is a design defect that is in every vehicle that could have had front seat airbags had the manufacturer provided them as soon as they were feasible.           

The Federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) government had rules. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 208 said that mandatory installation of car airbags would not be required if a large majority of people put on the lap and shoulder belt properly – which would provide adequate protection in 30 mph frontal crashes. Car manufacturers did not want to be forced to install airbags. They said that they feared liability suits when airbags did not work as well as people were lead to believe that they should. They also feared, rightly, other suits when people where injured by airbags that deployed when they were not needed, or deployed too forcefully for a small person on the passenger seat. Finally, internally, the car makers were convinced that they would loose sales by increasing the price of cars without having a selling-point to justify the increase. “Safety does not sell” has been proven so wrong in the years since. 

            TRY THIS

The industry proposed an alternative solution to make the seat belts so comfortable that people would put them on without complaint, under mild urging by a bell and a flashing light on the instrument panel. The increased convenience of putting on the seat belt would encourage a larger number of users. With enough seat belt use, the airbags would not be required. This lead to the design of versions of the window shade seat belt retractor. I will discuss that in another article. Their alternative ignored demonstrable fact that airbags offered superior protection for the head, face and neck.

FMVSS 208 required “passive crash protection” for occupants of the front seat. That meant that the crash protection had to be effective without any action by the occupant – automatic. Some manufacturers made cars equipped with “automatic” seat belts rather than airbags. That meant that the front seat passengers could just open the car door and get in. Then the seat belt would be “put on” the user’s body without any action by him. I discuss the evil aspects of that in another article, too. Aside from a very big wide passenger-side airbag, no one had an automatic crash protection system for a person in the center of the front seat. The answer to that was simple – design the front seat to get rid of the center position.

            MOUSE BELTS

One version of automatic crash protection was the motorized automatic shoulder belt. We called it the “mouse belt”.  The shoulder belt retractor reel was in the center console. When the user opened the car door, the outer end, which was attached to a movable anchor, was positioned at the front of the door opening. That held the chest strap away from the seat.  Toyota, in their pioneering version, permanently attached the strap to the sliding anchor. Closing the door operated an electric motor to make the belt anchor move up and back along to the door opening. To many, it looked like a grey mouse running along the upper inside of the roof. The movable anchor came to rest along the front edge of the car B-pillar, placing the shoulder belt where it ought to be. There were problems. Some users simply disconnected outer end of the webbing from a non-Toyota version of the “mouse”. Other users just slipped the shoulder belt over the head and put it behind them.

Safety advocates saw a real problem. In all versions, the user had to manually pull the lap belt over his body and put the latch plate in another buckle. “Had to”? Yes. It was not obvious that the automatic shoulder belt was not able to provide enough protection. Without the lap belt, the user’s lower torso would slide forward during a crash, putting him at risk of getting the shoulder belt caught under his chin. Toyota had provided a good semi automatic restraint system. They were clever enough to warn the user, by an instruction label on the back of the passenger sun visor, to adjust the seat so that his knees were closer than two inches from the lower instrument panel – which was lightly padded. Toyota knew that when the knees dug into the padded lower IP, that would limit the tendency to submarine under the shoulder belt and the lap belt, if it was used. Great – it worked well.

I liked the effort Toyota had made so I was hesitant to complain about another drawback.  The shoulder belt strap was much shorter than the typical lap shoulder belt combination. The usual shoulder belt ran up from the bottom of the B-pillar up to the D-ring, then down over the torso into the buckle at the inboard side. The mouse belt ran from the mouse at the top of the B-pillar to the retractor in the center console. It was about half the length of the full belt. In every frontal crash, the belt webbing stretches to absorb crash forces that would injure the user. A stiff shoulder belt can cause chest injuries and increases the strain on the neck, as it flexes over the belt. There were some injuries like that. Still, there was an overall benefit, so I praised Toyota, and even bought one with the mouse belts for myself.

A few cars had the “mouse” buckle attached permanently to the top rear edge of the door window frame. If you opened the door fully, the shoulder strap would be out of your way for getting in or out. The separate lap belt was still needed.

Other car manufacturers used versions of the mouse belt, often with a strap that could be detached from the mouse. That was another version of industry hypocrisy, like the door mounted seat belt system, described next.

 NO SHOULDER BELTS FOR THE BACK SEATS

Once upon a time, we Americans thought of shoulder belts for rear seat occupants as some­thing of a prestige item. They are standard equipment on many of the expensive sport sedans from Europe and Japan. Their purpose is to provide the same level of crash protection to the rear seat users as required for those in the front outer seating positions. Without that, it should be obvious that, during a frontal crash, a person in the rear seat will pivot forward about the lap belt (which will be buried in the junction between the legs and abdomen) and slam his head into the backside of the front seat. The car manufacturers know enough to make the upper part of the front seatback properly energy-absorbing. However, until we had success (see CRUSHED) the front seatback always tips forward when the fixture at the bottom is poorly restrained. With the top out of the way, the head impact will be with the relatively unforgiving lower backside of the seat frame.

In the days before the government required shoulder belts in back, some domestic manufacturers claimed that it was possible to request the new car dealer to install rear seat shoulder belts systems. Investigation has shown that many of the dealers did not even know of the availability of this dealer‑installed‑only option. Consumers Union did not discover any that stocked the hardware. Of course, the price for the optional hardware and installation is much higher than would be if the belts were 100 percent factory installed, because of the individual­ized labor to pull out the rear seats and interior trim to remove the conventional belts and replace them.

One of my first cases was like this. It involved a GM car with a six-year-old girl in the back seat with her smaller brother, who was in a child restraint device. Mom and dad, in the front, were using the lap shoulder belt available in the 1980’s. A drunk driver in a Nissan crossed the median and hit their Buick head-on. Despite the severity of the frontal impact, there were no life threatening injuries to the mother and father. The un-restrained driver of the offending car was hurt, of course. The lap belt, tight on Sabrina seated behind her mother, limited her forward movement so that her forehead swung ahead and down to hit the base of the seat frame in front of her. Because she was short, her head did not hit the mother’s head restraint. There was a lightly visible grease mark from her forehead sliding down on the seat back fabric. The innocent little girl had her head snapped back. The cervical fracture was like a hangman’s fracture of the neck – Sabrina was quadriplegic, unable to breathe without assistance.

Don’t you wonder why we had to have so many lawsuits like that before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the domestic car makers got the message? We had just as much trouble getting manufacturers to install head restraints positioned high enough to function as more than head “rests”. Ditto, for head restraints for the passengers in back, and a shoulder belt for the person who sits in the center of the rear seat. Yes, those things do add to the price of the vehicle. But, consider that money compensation for a child like Sabrina will be in the order to ten million dollars. There is a lifetime of pain and suffering for her and her parents and siblings. Money does not cover that.