[abawany]

I think I disagree a bit. Maybe safety is not the most important thing but it is pretty high up on the list of anyone with a certain awareness (victim of car accident, lost someone dear in a car accident, has a family, etc.) One reason SUVs have sucked the air out of automotive variety is their perceived safety, even over minivans (I am talking perception here, not reality).

Another reason is that cars have gotten increasingly safer and safe designs don't scream safety so it has gotten easy to ignore how important safety is and how bad things used to be in older cars. A minor crash in a 50s and earlier car would likely result in death or severe injury due to the lack of seat belts, lack of crumple zones, metal bayonets knobs on the dashboard, metal dashboards, etc.

[userbinator]

A minor crash in a 50s and earlier car would likely result in death or severe injury due to the lack of seat belts, lack of crumple zones, metal bayonets knobs on the dashboard, metal dashboards, etc.

Pre-50s is definitely going to be quite fragile, but it really depends what you mean by "minor". In a major crash, a modern car is going to be far safer, but in a minor one both the passenger and an older car are likely to survive with nearly no damage, whereas a modern car, although with the same outcome for the passenger, may be damaged extensively. Late 70s/early 80s bumpers were probably the best designed for this.

[abawany]

I am not sure about that. Seat belts were not mandated in the 50s so a crash resulted in significant passenger movement. Metal dashboards with bayonet knobs tended to cause significant damage based on my reading. I noticed that you put the link to the Lifeguard package in another reply but that was just a package available to some cars and was not bought in a prevalent manner by the public.

[toomanybeersies]

I was riding in the middle on the front bench seat of an old 70's car with no seatbelt on the highway a while ago (only other option was walking 50 km back home).

I have no idea how people used to think that it was at all safe, I was very aware that if the car crashed I was going to be ejected out the window, even in a low speed crash.

[userbinator]

What type of car was it? The 70s is well within the era of required seatbelts for US cars, which had been offering seatbelts since the 50s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeguard_(automobile_safety)

[toomanybeersies]

Holden HQ Kingswood, an Australian car. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden_HQ)

It had 2 seatbelts in the front, and none in the back. It was a bench seat in the front though, so we had 3 in the front and 4 in the back.

[abawany]

Remember that offering is not quite the same as available. From your link, it seems that Ford offered this as a package starting in 1956 for some models and it did not sell well [1]; some accuse it of making a half-hearted effort. However, I have to say that kudos to Ford and Robert McNamara for trying to sell safety and offering safer options well before others.

1968 was apparently the first year that seat belts were mandated in cars.

[1]: http://www.autonews.com/article/19960626/ANA/606260836/ford-...