Car Makers, Government Seek Seat Belt Consensus

Question: I was very interested a couple of weeks ago in the story about how the National Transportation Safety Board is urging the requirement of shoulder-harness seat belts in the back seats of new cars, and about how the lap seat belts now in use in the rear may be doing more harm than good. I also know that there’s some controversy over that.

Nevertheless, it seems logical to me that shoulder-harnesses should be better, and I am wondering if they are available now and can be added to an existing car.--R.L.

Answer: Controversy, indeed. Limited research (really limited--it encompassed only 26 crashes) suggests that rear-seat passengers might be better off in a head-on crash without a seat belt than with the flip-forward effect that a lap belt tends to have. The opposing argument takes the position that any kind of belt is better than none in the absence of more convincing research.

But, as you say, there’s a strong consensus that shoulder-harness belts in the rear would be a lot more effective than the present lap belts (as was proved to be the case in the front seat). In fact, both Ford and General Motors have already scheduled rear shoulder-harness seat belts as standard equipment on their ’89 models. Several foreign makers (among them Volvo and Saab) already have them in place, as does Ford in its foreign-built Merkur.

Having your present car equipped with rear shoulder harnesses (“retrofitting,” or modifying later design improvements into an existing model) is one of those ideas that is more practical in theory than it is in reality.

“Actually,” according to Harry Kelly of GM’s Los Angeles public relations regional office in Century City, “we had a retrofit kit as early as 1980. But there simply wasn’t any interest in it, so we discontinued it. Now, since the new interest in rear shoulder harnesses, we’re getting ready to reintroduce a new version. There’s no real problem with it, since the anchor points for the rear lap belts have passed all the safety tests and are perfectly adequate for shoulder harnesses as well. Our dealers will have them shortly, and not just for GM cars.”

Ford, however--while conceding that, technically, the rear anchor points are sufficiently strong for shoulder harnesses too--is moving more slowly into the retrofit business.

“We still think,” according to Bob Harner, who heads up Ford’s West Coast public affairs office, “that there’s more of a re-engineering problem involved than there seems to be. It’s not in re-engineering the anchor points,” Harner adds. “They’re all right and have met federal safety standards since ’72. It’s in re-engineering the harness belts themselves. Obviously, you wouldn’t be able to use one in a Lincoln that’s been designed for a Ford. And then you’ve got the problem of designing them for similar-sized cars but which are several years older. It would probably never be practical, for instance, to design a retrofit for a Pinto. It wouldn’t be effective for a model that old.”

Obviously, Harner continues, Ford will come out with a retrofit shoulder harness for older cars but not as quickly as GM is planning.

It’s still too soon to estimate costs, GM’s Kelly adds. “The retrofit kit we recently discontinued sold for about $125 installed but that was several years ago. I’m sure it will be more than that when the new ones come out.”

Public Demand

How much public demand--and how much the public will be willing to pay--for safety devices is always a nagging question within the automobile industry. Ford is one of several car manufacturers, for instance, that now offer the front-seat air bag as an option.

“I’d have to put the public’s interest in the air bag as ‘mild,’ ” Harner says. “It’s expensive, for one thing--about $800--and even that doesn’t begin to cover our costs.”

Receiving far less publicity than the air bag and the rear-seat shoulder harness is Ford’s anti-skid brakes, Harner says. “It’s probably the biggest major safety advance to come along, but you don’t hear too much about it here (in Southern California), because we don’t have nearly the wet-weather driving that other parts of the country have.”

Already standard equipment on Ford’s ’87 Thunderbirds and Cougars, the anti-skid brakes consist of electronic sensors on the wheels that sense when the wheels are about to lock and then alternately modulate the brakes on either side of the car to keep them stabilized.

It is generally conceded that the shoulder harness for rear-seat passengers, like the front-seat shoulder harness, will be modest enough in cost so that it will simply be absorbed into an automobile’s sticker price. (Although, admittedly, that’s not quite the same thing as saying that it will be without cost).

And so there you have it: The rear-seat shoulder harness is a safety idea whose time has definitely come. It is in the works--it’s just not here yet.

Not from Ford, not from GM and, according to a merchandising executive for Pep Boys (Manny, Moe and Jack), not from any of the independent manufacturers of automobile accessories, either.

Q: I’d like you to take a look at this copy of my latest Southern California Gas Co. bill and the envelope that I’m supposed to use to mail my check back. There was a lot of chest thumping about how “improved” this was supposed to be and how simple returning it would be--you just tear off the stub, slip the “return” part into the envelope, insert your check and Bingo! automatically the gas company’s return address shows in the window.

Now, will you kindly explain to me how this return address--which is far over on the left-hand side of the bill--is going to show in the envelope’s window, which is exactly centered in the envelope? I tried folding it--and wadding it up--three different ways and still couldn’t get the address to show in the window. So, I just stuck the check and the stub in any old way and wrote the gas company’s address on the envelope.

This is supposed to be an improvement? --J.T.

A: Ah, the agony of corporate decision making! You put a crew of graphic experts on a chore like this for months, ponder and reject dozens of suggested designs and then polish and repolish the final version for more months until it’s p-e-r-f-e-c-t.

“The main thing we really wanted to avoid,” according to Richard F. Tarrell, the gas company’s public-affairs news bureau manager, “was that maddening kind of envelope where you have to turn the stub over and insert it backwards in the envelope in order to have the address show up properly in the window. Half the time you get the envelope all sealed and then discover that you forgot to turn the stub over when you inserted it. And then you hurriedly try to pry the flap open before the glue’s had a chance to dry.”

Southern California Gas Co.’s new bill and return envelope happily avoid the possibility of such a mistake, Tarrell adds. What the company didn’t avoid, unfortunately, was the possibility that someone would absent-mindedly throw a box of the wrong envelopes into the hopper.

“As far as we can tell,” an embarrassed Tarrell says, “only one box of the old envelopes with the window in the center got mixed in with the new ones. We had used the old ones for customers sending in deposits but are in the process of phasing them out too. That means that, at the most, anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 customers--not, thank heavens! all 4 million of them--got the wrong envelope.

“So far,” he says, hopefully, “we’ve only got two calls on it.”

Don G. Campbell cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to consumer questions of general interest. Write to Consumer VIEWS, You section, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.