NHTSA Will Require Audible Seatbelt Reminders For Everyone In the Car (caranddriver.com) 39
Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver with the caption: "As someone that uses back seats to carry some luggage, I am not a fan of this requirement." From the report: Previously, federal standards governing seatbelt warnings only required manufacturers to monitor the driver's seat, issuing a chime if its seatbelt was unbuckled when the vehicle was underway. Now, a new rule has been finalized, requiring all new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. to have enhanced front seatbelt warnings by September 1, 2026, and rear seatbelt warnings by September 1, 2027.
It's exactly 50 years since Congress attempted to mandate ignition interlocks tied to seatbelt use, in an effort to reduce deaths on the road. In that instance, the public revolted and the House blinked, repealing the interlock requirement later in the same year. [...] The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that these new regulations will save about 50 lives per year, and reduce injuries by 500.
It's exactly 50 years since Congress attempted to mandate ignition interlocks tied to seatbelt use, in an effort to reduce deaths on the road. In that instance, the public revolted and the House blinked, repealing the interlock requirement later in the same year. [...] The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that these new regulations will save about 50 lives per year, and reduce injuries by 500.
Beaurocrats with too much time on their hands (Score:4, Insightful)
Having to justify their non jobs by added on ever more spurious "safety" systems with a law of diminishing returns regards to actual safety. Having said that its even worse in the EU with endless warnings and bongs going off from driver awareness systems that don't work and in some cases actually distract the driver from paying attention to the road.
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It's the problem when you have positions in government that are given a goal of reducing X by Y every year without a end point (or worse the ever favorite 'project 0' initiatives). The goals need to be set to get to a certain point of diminishing returns and then the positions eliminated and tax dollars shifted to something else. Instead, government only grows and never shrinks. Keeping obsolete agencies and projects alive forever.
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If I so much as lay my damn iphone in the passenger seat while driving the damn seatbelt alarm starts going off. Who the fuck weighs 8 ounces?
Belts are difficult for some (Score:2, Troll)
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If you can't fit into a seat belt, your body size is so moribund that you will die soon enough any way.
Easy fix (Score:2)
Just keep all the belts plugged in all the time
Re:Easy fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. Better headline proposal: "NHTSA Mandates that Seatbelts Must be Stored in the Engaged Position, and not Retracted."
Unintended consequences (Score:1)
I guess this means more and more people will buy (or 3d print) the short buckle clips and leave them in permanently to prevent cargo from triggering warnings. Likely meaning when an occasional passenger sits in the back seat and finds they cannot insert the buckle, they'll just decide to go without.
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I guess this means more and more people will buy (or 3d print) the short buckle clips and leave them in permanently to prevent cargo from triggering warnings. Likely meaning when an occasional passenger sits in the back seat and finds they cannot insert the buckle, they'll just decide to go without.
Yep, like when kids were jumping off a passenger bridge to play in a creek despite the sign saying it was dangerous they eventually shut down the bridge for an entire summer to raise the fencing because of safety. Well it was the only way out of that end of the park so people were taking the train bridge instead including one woman I saw with a stroller. Not everything is thought through.
Gilding the Lilly A Bit (Score:1)
My car is almost 6 years old. I can't remember the last time I had a rear seat passenger. Coupled with the rarity of injuries to rear seat passengers, the overall expense borne by the public for this extra hardware in 100's of millions of cars might be better spent in funding extra support directly to emergency services.
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It's more the risk of injury to those in the front seats from flying rear seat passengers. My 2017 Ford has seatbelt chimes and it is really not an issue.
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I had to disable mine in my 2016 BMW. Grocery bags and sometimes suitcases would trigger the passenger seatbelt warning.
I use the back seat for cargo a lot more frequently than the passenger one, I really hope implementations of this are either easy to disable or implemented as well as Ford seems to have done.
Prices to pay (Score:2)
OK, is the marginal return on this regulation, 50 deaths and 500 injuries, worth the added price, both the financial and the Orwellian boot descending on human faces for eternity? I submit it is not. There should be some price in this live for being a dumbs**t. This is one of those price points. Perhaps NHTSA should have a nice soul to soul conversation with DOGE.
{^_^}
Counterproductive regulations? (Score:2)
Wikipedia has a nice table of vehicle fatality statistics. Deaths per mile decreased steadily from roughly 1966 through 2014. In 2014, there were 1.08 deaths per million miles traveled. Since then, deaths/mile have increased by around 25%.
Is it possible that new safety regulations are becoming counterproductive? Just as an example: FMVSS 214 and 226 started a phased program in 2013 that has led to airbags in the pillars, and thick pillars reduce visibility.
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It's smartphone use that has increased the fatalities.
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"airbags in the pillars, and thick pillars reduce visibility."
As someone who's had an accident because a car was in my large blind spot to the rear I can testify to that. Yes, the accident was my fault, I should have done an over the shoulder full check and I normally do, but we're all human and humans make mistakes. The useless safety warning systems on my car would have been better utilised wanring me about vehicles in this blindspot , not just right next to me or out front where I can friggin see them!
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>"Yes, the accident was my fault, I should have done an over the shoulder full check and I normally do, but we're all human and humans make mistakes"
>" The useless safety warning systems on my car would have been better utilised wanring me about vehicles in this blindspot"
And next we will have mandates for blind spot monitors. And those don't work correctly all the time, but drivers will come to "trust" them and then NOT LOOK over the shoulder and miss things *because* they have such monitors. So th
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This is easily disproved. If more stringent safety regulations made safety worse, then you would expect to see increases in deaths in all developed nations, not just the US, because all developed nations have been increasing the stringency of car safety regulations. But you don't. It's only in the US that you see an increase. And that's because the US is super-sizing its car fleet (and replacing cars with trucks) much faster and more extensively than anywhere else, and that is much more deadly than any othe
50 people (Score:3)
If you want to save 50 people, have the police target red light runners. Just yesterday I almost hit a Jeep which thought running a red light after almost three seconds was perfectly fine. I'm at the head of the line. My light turns green. I go. As I'm just about at the intersection the Jeep comes from my right to make a left turn up the road beside me. Braking and plenty of horn was my response.
I can guarantee, ticketing those who blatantly run red lights would go a lot further than this seat belt nonsense which, as always, will cost people money when they buy a car.
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People hate red light cameras.
They seem to work though. When they were new people in my city were getting a lot more red light tickets than they are now.
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Red light cameras can actually INCREASE other types of accidents, with drivers slamming on their brakes during a yellow.
I want actual police there, ticketing people. I want them going after assholes that actually/meaningfully run lights, tailgate, don't use turn signals, can't stay in their lanes, have blinding headlights and illegal color lights all over, and drive with deafening bass/music blaring.
Instead, where I am, it seems none of that matters, all they care about is going after people for "speeding"
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Well, people are supposed to stop during a yellow and only to continue if unable to stop in time, hence the car behind is supposed already be braking at that time, not trying to run the yellow light as well. Also, people are supposed to keep the bloody distance instead of being tailgating arseholes.
Responses here are reminding me of the 1970s (Score:1)
You are here. Many also are in the "whinging about something that's obviously a good idea" stage. They're talking about a thing going beep, I saw one person describing that in (literal) Orwellian terms
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its not about avoiding wearing seatbelts.
its avoiding having stupid alarms go off when you put your bag on the seat.
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How many times have you been in the back seat? By the time I; put my arse on the seat, put my stuff on the floor/empty seat, slowly extend the seat-belt strap, feel for the receiver in the dark, feel around a third time because it's underneath me, align the tongue with the receiver, turn-over the tongue because it's upside-down, push it in, that's 20-50 seconds. The driver has to wait until I do all that before merging with traffic.
I not objecting to safety-conscious drivers, but don't belittle the very
People will find a way (Score:3)
You can't engineer out stupid or irresponsible. You only end up pissing people off. As someone who drives a nearly 40 year old SUV, whenever I travel somewhere and have to rent a car, all of the "safety" features frustrate me. How the hell do I get this damn thing into reverse?!? Oh, I have to step on the brake, pat my head, and rub my stomach in order to release the parking brake? Jesus, I just want to DRIVE THE DAMN CAR!! I've been traveling with my dog and I have to plug in the passenger seat belt to keep the damn warning lights and dings from going off every time the dog moves into the front seat. If I have to do this in the back seats, that's going to piss me off even further. What's going to happen is someone is going to start selling seat belt plugs on Amazon. That is until the nanny state mandates something like they have to be unplugged and then plugged in order to start the car. That's also going to ruin a Hollywood horror movie trope.
fairs fair. (Score:2)
Sorry NHTSA, but if they're not smart enough to put on a seat belt, I don't want them to survive.
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That will work for the driver, but for passengers, the result is serious brain damage or broken bones. If it's brain damage or a broken neck, the government is liable for a lifetime of home/hospital care. If it's a damaged vertebra, that's a life-time of addictive pain medication.
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God no (Score:2)
Just no. I'm OK with seatbelt laws. I'm OK with a reminder chime for the first minute the vehicle is in gear or whatever.
I already have a car that periodically dings if I so much as put my lunch bag on the front passenger seat and I want to rip the fucking speakers out and shove them up the manufacturer's ass.
Hopefully they can be disabled (Score:2)
Any new car bought in the past 10 years has rear seatbelt warnings, but they all allow you to disable them. This is because the systems don't account for all the random stuff that gets thrown into the back seat of a vehicle, and also don't deal with child seats, nor do they deal with drop-offs.
Hopefully whatever this regulation is allows the driver to dismiss the alert and/or allows the system to be completely turned off. We had it turned off for the 9 years my child was in a car seat / booster seat because
I will be disabling this... (Score:1)
Tickets (Score:3)
A cop on a /motorcycle/ will pull you over and demand money from you for not being safe.
Many stupid people are easily fooled into not seeing this by all the added steps of abstraction that are interposed to control them.