> Automakers objected, contending that manufacturing costs would rise, seat belts would imply increased accident rates and safety wasn’t a selling point with customers.
Decades later, they did the same with airbags, ironically trying to get out of it by pushing mandatory buckle-up laws to shift responsibility from the industry to consumers.
Car companies want to sell cars and therefore they want to minimize the overhead spent on regulatory compliance. It's really easy to sit here in 2019 and clutch your pearls about the evil car companies not wanting air bags in everything but the reality is that those car companies were catering to consumers (or at least a fairly accurate approximation of consumers). Consumers regarded airbags and seat-belts as minor incremental safety improvements in their day (the way we would think about something like blind spot detection today) and generally cared more about price than they did about the presence of those specific features and would gladly forgo airbags in exchange for several hundred dollars of the purchase price.
1st gen airbags also have a well deserved reputation for turning accidents you could have walked away from with bruises into a trip to the hospital so many people actively didn't want them.
Edit: Yes, I'm totally wrong and everybody in 1965 was tripping over themselves to buy a new car specifically for the seat-belts and everyone in 1985 could not get enough airbags and the car companies totally misread what consumers wanted. <eyeroll/>
> Automakers objected, contending that manufacturing costs would rise, seat belts would imply increased accident rates and safety wasn’t a selling point with customers.
Decades later, they did the same with airbags, ironically trying to get out of it by pushing mandatory buckle-up laws to shift responsibility from the industry to consumers.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-02-19-mn-546-st...