Remember automatic seatbelts, those weird door-mounted or motorized belts some automakers adopted in the early 1990s to meet federal passive requirements more cheaply than airbags? The first manufacturer to offer them in regular production was Volkswagen, which introduced them as an option for the VW Rabbit in 1975. Here’s why Volkswagen developed these belts and how they worked.
Although federal safety regulations didn’t require passive restraint devices on all U.S. passenger cars until the 1990 model year, the National Highway Safety Bureau (predecessor of the modern NHTSA) first proposed such a requirement back in 1969. The passive restraint rule, which became part of Federal Motor Vehicles Safety Standard (FMVSS) 208, was originally supposed to take effect for 1974, but court challenges and political wrangling pushed the effective date back to 1976, then into the ’80s.
Why did regulators want passive restraints? By the end of the 1960s, federal safety standards required new cars to provide seatbelts, but fewer than 20 percent of Americans actually used them. “We feel that we want to protect that 80 per cent of the population who won’t do anything,” NTSB director Douglas W. Toms explained in 1970. “If we thought we could depend upon people to fasten their seatbelts, we’d be delighted to go to a lap belt, airbag system.”
Safety advocates still thought “passive restraint” should mean airbags, but federal regulators wanted manufacturers to have the flexibility to find alternatives or better technological solutions. So, rather than explicitly requiring airbags, the FMVSS 208 standard set out a series of requirements for injury protection in a 30 mph barrier crash and specified that vehicles had to be able to provide that protection “by means that require no action by vehicle occupants.”
Volkswagen research director Ulrich Seiffert was wary of airbags for passive restraint — he believed they “can only be supplemental to a lap belt or a three-point belt.” The NHTSA had indicated that automatic seatbelts would be an acceptable passive protection system if it met the injury protection criteria, so VW decided to go that way rather than develop airbags for its production cars.
VW originally called its automatic seatbelts the VWRA (Volkswagen Restraint Automatic) system. This had four parts:
- Front torso belts with the buckles on the front door frames
- Seat-mounted belt retractors with a two-stage inertia reel that would lock with any sudden movements that exceeded a certain acceleration
- An impact-absorbing foam-padded aluminum knee bolster
- An ignition interlock that would prevent the engine from starting if the front belts were not buckled, and a warning light that would come on if a belt was unbuckled with the engine running. (The engine would not stall if a belt was unbuckled.)
The system did not include front lap belts. Volkswagen did ask the NHTSA in 1974 if including separate manually buckled lap belts would cause the system to be considered active rather than passive; the NHTSA said it wouldn’t, provided the system met the FMVSS 208 requirements without manual belts. VW decided to forgo lap belts anyway, contending that the knee brace would prevent “submarining” under the torso belt without the risk of secondary injuries an improperly placed lap belt could cause.
VW arranged the latch for each shoulder belt so that with the door closed, it engaged an anchorage plate on the center roof pillar, which used the same backing plates as cars with regular three-point belts. Thus, as long as the door was closed, any loads on the belt would go into the unit body structure rather than the door itself.
Volkswagen initially installed the VWRA system on 50 1973–1974 Beetle sedans for fleet evaluation, and then offered the passive belts on the new VW Rabbit for 1975. The system was initially a $30 option. In subsequent years, the automatic seatbelts were sometimes standard on the Rabbit “L” (Deluxe) and optional on other models; at other times, they were optional on all models; and VW eventually offered them as a no-cost option for the Mk2 Golf and Jetta.
How many Volkswagens got the automatic seatbelt system? Quite a few. Volkswagen apparently didn’t have a lot of luck selling the passive belts as an extra-cost option, but making them standard equipment on the more expensive Rabbit and Jetta models eventually put a lot of them on the road. By 1979, Volkswagen had built about 110,000 cars with the door-mounted belts, by far the highest-volume passive restraint system anyone had yet offered.
If you wanted to, you could buckle and unbuckle the shoulder belts manually (the NHTSA required them to have a single-point emergency release latch), but the idea was that you would just leave them attached all the time. Volkswagen insisted that the belts were unobtrusive when used as intended, and in contemporary surveys, owners found them easier to live with than the similar but more convoluted passive belt system Chevrolet offered on the Chevette in the late ’70s. However, modern owners seem to prefer to buckle the belts manually — I had to scour the Internet to find photos of cars with the belts engaged. With the belts unlatched, the easiest way to spot a 1975–1980 Rabbit with the VWRA system is to look for the massive shelf-like knee bolster bar under the dashboard.
Volkswagen of America announced on April 30, 1981 that it had installed the system on 400,000 cars, and said that 42 percent of U.S.-built cars were now coming off the assembly line with automatic belts.
For 1981, Volkswagen redesigned the knee bolsters to make them less obtrusive than before.
Did the automatic seatbelts work? For the most part, yes. A 1981 Highway Safety Research Center study concluded that the automatic belts were somewhat less effective than a conventional three-point harness at preventing serious injuries or fatalities. However, because people were substantially more likely to use the automatic belts, they reduced accident injuries by 20 to 30 percent and cut the accident fatality rate in half compared to conventional seatbelts. The driver of the totaled Rabbit pictured above survived a 35 mph frontal impact with serious but not life-threatening injuries.
It wasn’t all rosy, however. Volkswagen eventually faced a series of high-profile lawsuits from victims of side-impact or rollover accidents who contended that their injuries wouldn’t have happened (or would have been less severe) if the automatic belt system had included lap belts, and argued that VW was negligent for not providing them.
Volkswagen lost several of those cases at trial, but appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that the plaintiffs had no right to sue because VW’s compliance with federal safety regulations preempted state tort claims. Nonetheless, Volkswagen modified the automatic seatbelt system for the 1990 Golf and Jetta to incorporate separate manually buckled front lap belts.
Like most of the auto industry, Volkswagen lobbied hard against the federal passive restraint standard. However, after yet another round of court battles, NHTSA issued rules in 1984 that finally phased in the requirement between 1987 and 1990. Volkswagen was slow to adopt airbags — the Cabriolet got a driver’s side airbag for 1990, but the Golf and Jetta continued to use the updated door-mounted belt system through 1992, and the Corrado, Fox, and Passat adopted motorized front shoulder belts with manual lap belts. In late 1991, a new federal law finally, unequivocally required all new cars to have both manual three-point belts and dual front airbags by the 1998 model year. All U.S.-market VW cars adopted them by 1995, finally consigning the old automatic seatbelt systems to the history books.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1975 VW Golf Mk1/Rabbit – The Most Influential Global Compact Car Of The Past 50 Years (by Paul N)
1979 Volkswagen Rabbit: VW Jumps The Shark With A Baby Blue Rabbit Made In the USA (by me)
Our 1991 Subaru Loyale wagon had them. We called them “mouse” belts for the way they skittered along the door frame.
Fascinating. We never had these in Europe.
Hope a next installment will be about motorised seat belts. Something that was quite common in the early 90s but vanished when the airbag became the standard. I know many (most) people despised of the motorised seat belts but I would love to have a Jaguar XJ40 equipped with that.
When you talk Seat (Safety) belts, it was Australia (down under) who have to be the world leaders when it comes to safety belts and using them.
Australia was the first country in the world to mandate the installation and use of safety belts in cars. This law took effect nearly 60 years ago, in January 1969. From that date all cars sold in Australia had to be fitted with safety belts and the seat belts had to be used. This was and still is strictly enforced with heavy fines for those who elect to not ‘buckle up’.
Accordingly today in Australia there are at least two generations who never experienced driving without wearing a safety belts. In addition to this Australia has very strictly enforced speed limits. Many divided freeways have a maximum speed of 80KPH (45 MPH) and no where in Australia can you exceed 110KPH.
While many are critical of the above it does save thousands of lives each year. Australia’s annual death (road) toll is incredibly small when compared with other developed countries. The United States kills an average of 45,000 Americans in road accidents every year. This is a shocking number, but reflects the high speeds that Americans routinely drive on their interstate highways. The posted speed limits are treated as being ‘advisory speeds’ and the commonly held view is that its o.k. To do a limit over the limit, but that “little bit” frequently turns out to be a lot.
In more recent times, the popular use of even ‘hands free’ phones in cars is becoming a major cause of accidents. Australia has introduced laws banning the use of hand held phones in cars which is a good thing. Hopefully this will eventually develop into a total ban of mobile (Cell) phone use in cars. The sooner the better.
Airbags, particularly forward facing airbags are not ideal for short drivers or front seat passengers who are under 5 feet tall. They do pose a risk for shorter people and are only useful for an occupant wearing a correctly adjusted safety belt. No safety belt and the airbag can kill you!
I will never understand why anyone would travel in a car, any car without a seat belt. Great article.
The U.S. was astonishingly resistant to seat belt laws for a very long time. In the 1970s, even proposals to offer extra highway funding for states that passed seat belt use laws got nowhere. The final U.S. passive restraint rule actually had an escape clause that would have nullified it if a certain number of states had passed laws to require seat belts by a certain date; they didn’t make it. Today, I think all states here have seat belt use laws, but it took more than 20 years, and politicians at both the state and federal levels were terrified of them, assuming they would be horrendously unpopular with constituents.
I would love to see a interlock system where your car won’t start unless your phone is OFF.
Wow…I had forgotten about these. I had a car with the motorized belts and knew about the GM mousebelts. And I recall in the 90’s there were cars that had both the inferior belts and one airbag (if not two)…probably not a good combination.
My ’93 Fox had this passive system, and I remember the knee bar and separate lap belts. Got used to the shoulder strap fairly quickly. Now, the motorized ones on my friend’s Escort tried to strangle me…
I remember these belts, a friend of mine had a ’75 Rabbit-you had to be something of a contortionist to get in the car.
““We feel that we want to protect that 80 per cent of the population who won’t do anything,” NTSB director Douglas W. Toms explained”
Pity, that. A gradual, self-induced cull of that 80% wouldn’t have harmed the joint. They sure as hell couldn’t have voted, for instance.
To be a little bit kinder, the constancy of car industry lobbying, and lying, and prevaricating, and law-suiting on anything to do with safety (or health) for the protection of their profits, so mightily abused those admirable US foundation principles of freedom that it was bound to leave a legacy of confusion in the community (that is, confusion between something being a terrible personal imposition and it being a communally commonsense thing to do).
I get your point, but I would actually say that to a significant extent the car makers were also reflecting the strong inherent bias against safety features. Ford launched a major safety campaign in 1956, offering padded dashes, breakaway mirrors, reinforced door locks and seat belts (for $9) supported by a major ad campaign. Buyers shunned it like the plague. The campaign ended after two years. The 80% just didn’t want to hear about car safety, with their heads well planted in the sand.
It took a younger generation of Americans, buyers as well as regulators, to accept the need for safety features.
I remember my mother telling me about how, when she was in college in the 1950s, she and her roommate went on a double date with 2 guys. One of the guys owned a Ford equipped with seatbelts and when he drove them to the date, he insisted that they use the seatbelts and buckle themselves in the car. My mother says the she and her roommate decided that the guy was a “weirdo” and they never went out with him again.
I remember these quite well.
Minor detail: I’m quite sure the interior shot of the 1981 with the redesigned dash is not a passive belt version, as there aren’t any knee bolsters at all. The pictures of the 1990 Jetta clearly show them to still be there, even if a bit less intrusive than before.
I agree. My 84 GTI with 3 point belts had those same lower dash panels, no support behind them, just plastic
Actually, it does include the knee bolster. For the 1981 Westmoreland Rabbit, VW resigned the dashboard, extending it rearward on all models to hide the bolster (as is done on all cars today). One major hiccup as seen in the photo was that it stuck out so far rearward that the you’d often hit your hand on the bolster while cranking the windows.
Ok, but it’s a bit odd how they then extended those knee bolsters again for the Mk. II. But I guess the right side if the dash was further forward.
Yes. Also, if you look at the other photos of the car at the PCAR Market listing, the belt latch is very clearly on the doorframe, not on the pillar, although the belts are detached in all the photos. (If they had been attached, I would have used more of those photos.)
From my knowledge, most cars of the 80s and 90s that used automatic belts in the U.S. were fitted with regular seat belts here in Canada. It’s likely because we had higher belt usage rates than down south at the time.
Exceptions I know of pre-1995 Saturns, 1993-1995 Mercury Villagers/Nissan Quests (which used motorized shoulder belts and manual lap belts) and GM’s various late 80s/early 90’s vehicles (which retained the door-mounted belts).
More likely Canada just didn’t have any law requiring passive restraints, and it was cheaper to equip Canadian-market cars with regular belts.
Had them on my 77 Rabbit L up here in Canada. Got used to them very easily plus the bonus shelf for a pack of cigarettes!
The lack of lap belts is surprising. Wouldn’t it be safer to be to have a secured torso than have your knees slam into the bolster during the “second collision”. Belt systems are great if they aren’t disabled. I have a friend who’s in his late 70’s that just attaches his to the receiver and sits on them! Been doing it for 20 years -even with passive belts..
Sliding under the passive door mounted belts on my 92 Achieva while wearing a trench coat would leave me tangled. GF at the time wouldn’t use them while in a dress or skirt – I always left them in manual mode after an embarrassing incident that left revealing too much skin when I opened the door for her.
Indeed, that’s crazy that they didn’t even have a lap belt for those who didn’t want their knees to be the first line of defense.
One of my dad’s buddies had an 80s Escort with the motorized belt. I watched him do the same thing, just kept the belt behind him.
I had a 1990 Pontiac 6000 which was the first year that GM used the “automatic” belts in that line of cars. It looked interesting fastened with the door open. But instead of feeling like I was climbing through a maze, I always just used it like a standard belt. But one thing about these belts was less safe. If the door popped open in an accident, you could easily fall out. This was especially a concern on the many days that the door latch linkage would freeze up. It wasn’t the latch itself. I could slam the door over and over, but the door wouldn’t latch until it got warm enough to thaw the linkage. Many days I’d have to hold the door closed while driving to work, until I got to the end of my road. Then try slamming it and see if it would catch. If not then hold it until the next stop sign and try again.
It depends a lot on how you define “safer.” In a frontal collision, not necessarily, since it’s easy to wear a lap belt wrong (especially if you’re much taller or shorter than a standard test dummy), which can be counterproductive and may cause a variety of secondary injuries. The knee bolster approach was more consistently protective, although it did tend to increase the risk of a fractured femur.
In a side impact or a rollover, it was a different story, which landed Volkswagen in court several times. There were at least three major lawsuits from people who had been seriously injured (a woman who suffered serious head injuries when her Rabbit skidded off the pavement and flipped; a teenage boy who had ended up paraplegic when his Jetta was hit in the side by a pickup truck; and the family of someone who had been killed in another side impact accident), contending that the lack of a lap belt increased their injuries and was design negligence on Volkswagen’s part.
Aaron, I define “safer” as in correct and proper use. Any safety device not implemented as designed will introduce a greater risk of injury. I would welcome seeing the data on bolster / lap belt injuries. As a safety manager, I always plan / train / instruct / design for the worst case and as you say, use of a lap belt would have helped those folks.
Don’t roller coasters have full restraints and not just knee bolsters?
“Correct and proper use” is not how real-world accident data works, I’m afraid. Real-world accidents are measured based on severity (typically rated on the Abbreviated Injury Scale, which runs from 0 for no or trivial injuries to 6 for untreatable fatal injuries) and incidence. For instance, the 1981 study concluded that the VW automatic belts resulted in 20 to 30 percent fewer serious or fatal injuries than manual belts; part but not all of that was due to the greater likelihood of use. Even consistently getting belt use data in the accident statistics is a pain, and there’s no realistic way to assess whether accident victims were wearing their belts correctly or not.
One of the questions the 1981 DOT study tried to look at was whether Rabbits with passive belts produced more knee injuries that might be attributable to the bolster. The tentative answer was no, but none of the state accident data actually had a category for “knee” (just upper leg, lower leg, and abdomen), the injury location data was incomplete, and omitting accidents for which no or incomplete data were available raised questions about how representative the totals were.
Volkswagen’s internal crash test data, which they published in 1979, showed that compared to a conventional three-point belt, the passive belt/bolster system did produce substantially more femur force (an average of 76 percent more for the driver, 90 percent more for the front passenger), but was still less than half the limit allowed by FMVSS 208, which was 1,400 lb.
The passive belt/knee bolster combination produced substantially LOWER head injury criteria than either a conventional three-point belt or the passive belt plus a manual lap belt. Ulrich Seiffert explained that this was a dummy kinematic thing: a torso belt caused the dummy’s head and upper torso to rotate downward more than the torso belt alone. Whether that would hold true in the same way in the real world is a whole other question, but in the tests required for FMVSS 208, the passive belt/knee bolster WITHOUT lap belt provided the best compromise between head, leg, and chest injury risk.
Those test didn’t include rollover or side impact crashes, which were the type of accidents involved in the big lawsuits. Anecdotally, the passive belts didn’t even keep occupants very secure in brisk cornering, so there was reason to doubt their effectiveness in rollover or side impact scenarios. Trying to estimate how much lap belts might have helped was obviously speculative (and of course would depend on whether the occupant would have been wearing the lap belt if it were provided), and because rollover accidents are fairly rare, real-world data is spotty. VW essentially argued, and the high courts ultimately agreed, that it didn’t matter because they had complied with the requirements of the federal safety standards.
Abdominal injuries related to lap belts and the lap portion of three-point belts have been well-documented for many, many years; the term “seat belt syndrome” was coined in 1961. Before child seat laws, it was particularly prevalent in younger children, but it can still be pretty severe in adults.
I was intrigued by the passive belt feature when I was shopping for my new 1975 Rabbit but ultimately decided to go with the conventional 3-point belts. I didn’t want to be a guinea pig, and as it turns out, the conventional belts were more effective (and I always used them).
I deal with them once to twice a week. Have to admit that I sometimes forget the lap belt maybe one out of twenty times in this car only. Realize after I arrive at destination. My cars comprise five different ways to use belts.
By ’84 VW had dropped them from the base Rabbit (Rabbit L) as we bought a new Diesel, that had the mounting provisions for those belts on the door/frame, but had a standard 3 point buckle-it-yourself belt.
Ford used their motorized system for quite a few years (on Escort, Tempo, Topaz and others). As I recall, my Dad’s ’86 Mercury Cougar had them, and he would sometimes open the driver’s door to look out to the rear, when backing up. I recall him being surprised when the motorized belt retracted as he opened the door, grabbing him right around the neck!
They were certainly safer than not wearing belts, but were essentially a way automakers were trying to get around the expense and complexity of airbags.
Volkswagen went back and forth on how the automatic seatbelts were offered, and dropped them from the standard equipment list for 1982 as a price-cutting measure — the Rabbit was getting hammered in the U.S. market for being too expensive. The passive belts remained optional for $70.
I had several Rabbits over the years and one of them had the passive belts. They were not terribly inconvenient but the real problem was passengers. Often, they were startled by the belt attached to the door and didn’t know what to do the belt which was in front of them.
The other point of confusion for later owners seems to be the seatbelt interlock. While working on this post, I saw an older discussion on a VW forum started by someone who was puzzled that their third-hand Rabbit wouldn’t start unless the seatbelts were fastened, and the other forum participants were confidently assuring them there was absolutely no way a late ’70s Volkswagen would have had an ignition interlock for the seatbelts.
I had a 1990 VW Jetta with an interior identical to the one pictured above, only in blue, that was involved in an accident which demonstrated the efficacy of the VW passive restraints.
The other driver ran a 4-way stop sign and hit me squarely in the rear passenger door. The force spun the car around 180 degrees with such force that it sheared the left rear wheel off the axle and ended up underneath the car when it finally came to rest. I was uninjured and fortunately nobody else was in the car. The driver of the Olds Cutlass Calais that hit me, who was found at fault, was driving unbelted and suffered severe whiplash and several cuts and bruises. According to the EMTs on the scene, the passive restraints did their job well and likely spared me from severe injury.
Although the car was repaired well and drove as if nothing happened, we ended up trading the Jetta in on a Volvo 850 about six months later. We needed a larger car since we then had an infant and toddler in bulky safety seats and the Jetta was rather cramped. With the memory of the accident still quite fresh, Volvo’s safety systems played a large part in that choice, as the 850 as the first car sold in the U.S. with multiple airbags, including side curtains.
I suspect belts like this would be illegal in my country, not being anchored to a fixed and suitably reinforced part of the structure..
While I understand the desire to save the lives of those too (insert choice of pejorative adjective here) to buckle up a belt, I have to ask – wouldn’t an easier route to save lives simply have been to make wearing belts compulsory? Like in so many other countries. Or deny insurance injury claims if belts are found not to have been worn?
Or would that fall foul of some amendment to the constitution?
Apparently Americans were REALLY stubborn about not wanting to wear seatbelts before my time. It was becoming the norm when I was growing up.
Or would that fall foul of some amendment to the constitution?
Not so much an amendment but the original constitution. Peter, the US is a federal republic, and the constitution limits the federal government’s authority in some key ways. The federal government’s primary role is in defense, foreign relations and the regulation of all activities that are by nature outside of the scope of the individual states, such as interstate commerce, etc.. But things like seat belts or helmet laws fall under the jurisdiction of the individual states; the federal government has no power to mandate such a thing.
Believe it or not, there is still one state-New Hampshire-that still does not have a seat belt law.
I remember seeing an actual setup in a dealer, and traces later on. The Rabbit convertible used the knee bar as body reinforcement and my 84 Jetta had divots in the door frames to mount the belts and a second glovebox in the vestigial knee bar.
VW’s system had the benefit of being first and well thought out unlike GM’s abysmal door mounted seatbelts that nobody used as intended.
My family were outliers in the 70s, since after a relative had been badly injured in the early 60s were sticklers for wearing seat belts
My girlfriend had a ’75 Rabbit. She’d keep the belt unattached or unclipped somehow, if I remember correctly.
My ’88 Ford Tempo company car had the electric shoulder belt. Kinda liked it.
I’m continually amazed at the basic ignorance of seat belt haters .
I still hear “I’d rather be thrown clear” and other nonsense .
I remember these door mounted belts and didn’t like them but I’ve been a seat belt user / enthusiast since early childhood as seat belts hold one i place during spirited driving .
Those who like to claim “it hurts no one else if I don’t and crash” are simply lying and refuse to accept reality, much like the (apparently) brain dead Motocyclists who refuse to wear helmets claiming “muh FREEDOM!” .
Glad to see most have accepted seat belt use, all my vehicles, even the oldies have seat belts, often installed by me upon purchase .
I also take the time to wash the old stiff belts that don’t flex easily and stymie retractors .
-Nate