DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

The number of adjustable items in the average car has almost kept pace with the proliferation of cupholders. Currently it’s possible to adjust brake pedal height, headrests, shoulder belt angle, ride and handling and inside and outside mirrors. This doesn’t even count power seats which have what seems like 600 different positions.

I say “almost” because there’s one area of needed adjustment that hasn’t been addressed — seat belt buckles. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Pull the three-way safety belt around you and put the tip into the clamp. It’s so simple a cartoon character could do it, right? WRONG, Elmo! Or at least it’s wrong if you’re a cartoon character with arthritis.

I was first made aware of this missing necessity when I was using a press vehicle for evaluation and my wife and I were going to dinner at “The Steel Room” at our local White Castelle. The vehicle had what seemed like an oversized center console lid and the buckle for the seatbelt was towards the back of the seat itself. I was waiting for my wife to connect her belt before we left our driveway. There seems to be a lot of suicidal squirrels in our development and I wanted to make sure she was safely buckled in lest the vehicle rollover in the event of hitting one of the fatter members of the species.

As I waited for what was an interminable amount of time I became concerned that I would miss my flight that I had scheduled the following week because she was taking so long. Turns out that with a winter coat on and the small amount of space between her and the console lid she was having an impossible time trying to hook up her belt. Her arthritis in her hand and shoulder wasn’t helping matters. She asked me for help.

Being the Sir Galahad I am I grabbed her belt and attempted to hook it. In my search for the elusive buckle I suddenly scraped my ham of a hand on the chrome ornamentation surrounding the lid and uttered some toilet words that would make Eric Cartman blush. (I finally got it connected but not until my diabetically affected skin was oozing blood. I don’t really want to name the car make so I’ll just give you a hint: it was either a domestic or an import vehicle; that’s all I’ll say.)

Several weeks later I had another vehicle with a similar problem but at least this one didn’t have a console lid that was carnivorous. But it was damn near impossible to reach for someone with limited range of their arm.

It was then that I began to wonder just how difficult it would be to make an adjustable seat belt connector latch. (Actually, my first question was how much crack have designers ingested to have ignored such a potential dilemma for so many decades, but that’s another topic for a tornadic day.) It could be a ratchet-like clamp or even something with a locking expansion. It doesn’t seem like that advanced-technology of a device that any 10-year-old couldn’t perfect, let alone a graduate engineer making $10 per hour.

Maybe the reason this hasn’t been previously addressed is due to the behind-the-scenes activities of the four-point seatbelt lobby. Four-point seatbelts are common in race cars, aircraft cockpits and other modes of transportation where the extra belt makes it more secure for the operator to be occupying the seat. That’s what eventually brought upon the development of the three-point seatbelt, invented by a Volvo engineer when it seemed like people were being “launched” from simple lap belts, especially in a frontal collision, and playing dueling foreheads with the windshield.

I don’t know how many engineers and/or designers read my columns or have my columns read to them by their kids but if a hard, but poor-working journalist like me can come up with a need for, and a couple of scenarios for rectifying this problem (and I was an accounting major in college) then somebody who is trained to invent things like my Cheetos-addled brain did can surely work up something during his or her lunch hour.

Even while loading up a vehicle with a ton of adjustable features there’s always that subtle comparison to my plate at the salad bar of a Ruby Tuesday’s…”there’s always something more that can be added.”