Hej, Peter.
When I read your posts, Dan, I get the impression that your study first, the apply some research, and after THAT do stuff.
Yes. Some people don't like it, but stuff breaks and costs money when I try to do it any other way.
The hole car is not design for belts at all - or a collision...And the more I read, the less I want to have the kids nowhere near the Dart...
Well, yeah. You could swap in Chrysler Sebring front seats with integral 3-point belts, but that won't stop the solid steering column spearing you right through the heart, won't keep the doors closed, won't add side-impact protection, won't fireproof the fuel system, won't address the lack of a good way to mount rear 3-point belts (which US cars didn't even have to have until about 1989) etc. There is no getting around the simple, basic fact that a '63 Dart is an unsafe car. That's an unpopular thing to say on here, but it's absolutely true. See the 5th big paragraph in
this post, then see
here for the followup (which contains the data to refute faulty thinking like "When I was a kid, everyone drove '60s and '70s cars running on leaded gasoline and nobody wore seatbelts and everybody smoked cigarettes and lookit, I'm still alive!").
One consequence of my main professional line of work (involved with traffic safety research) is that I can no longer pretend it's safe to drive an old car. It just plain is not. You're fine until your luck runs out, and then—very quickly—you are very maimed or very dead. If I were single, maybe I wouldn't care so much. But I'm married, which means if I get injured so I can't work, or I get killed, at least one other person in the world is severely screwed, not to mention desperately sad. I don't want to bring suffering on myself, but I absolutely will not bring suffering on anyone else in the world if I can reasonably avoid it.
Back in the "good old days" (which didn't really exist, we only remember them that way), there was no alternative—everybody drove unsafe cars because that was the only kind available. We just did our best not to think about it, because the only other option was to stay off the roads. Now we have much better options. Now even the worst, least-safe car you can buy in a civilised country is
enormously safer in a crash than even most of the safest cars of just ten years ago (real cars from legitimate makers, not the Chinese garbage now available in Australia and some other countries). Most of us have seen
this, which makes the point, but also take a look at
this. That's two cars both much newer than the newest A-body…look and listen to the results in reality.
:-\
