I would like to purchase an aftermarket seat belt/ignition interlock for my car. I would like to ensure that my teenage driver is buckling up before driving. However, my internet searches come up empty. Any dopers know of such a product?
No. They were HUGELY unpopular when they were mandated decades ago as they were annoying and trouble-prone, and were quickly un-mandated. There isn’t enough demand to justify making them.
Many modern vehicles here beep angrily at anyone who fails to buckle up. Of course you can get a £60 fine for it, but many people still dont. At the haulage company where I worked, the boss used to check to see if any belts had been left buckled - some (well one) drivers were breaking the law, and if caught it would not be good for the company.
Maybe you could get something that would beep?
I see you have these too - Ebay is full of gadgets to stop the beep
Say you install such a device. If your teen doesn’t want to use the belt, the teen just buckles the belt and sits on it.
Here’s what you do. The first time you see or hear credible evidence that you teen isn’t wearing the seat belt while in a car, you take away the keys for a week or month. It’s called parenting and sure beats any technological solution over the long run.
IME, teens nowadays are ingrained with the buckle-up idea. My daughter (now 23) would harp on me to buckle up, and I credit her with changing my attitude regarding driving safety.
I remember them when I was a kid. Technically they weren’t even true ‘interlocks’, IOW they didn’t *prevent *the ignition from working if you didn’t buckle the seat belt. All they did was cause an annoying buzzer to sound continuously until you did. Front passenger seat had one too, though it had an extra switch that only enabled it if someone was sitting there. As kids in the back seat we would often reach around and push down on the front passenger seat to make the buzzer go off.
My parents’ car was a 70s AMC something, maybe other cars actually locked out the ignition but I can’t remember ever seeing one.
For anyone thinking of interlocks … The auto-lock-tensioner (of the seatbelt ) can jam when the vehicle is parked on the hill, and when that happens the seat belt is often to short to buckle in… It would be annoying to have to call a tow truck just to move the car down the hill to a flat part, where the auto-lock mechanism starts working properly again…