There was a period around the late 1980s - early 1990s where the federal government mandated either an airbag or automatic seatbelts. A lot of cars when the automatic seatbelt route, especially cheaper cars, because it cost less than adding an airbag.
I guess the idea was that automatic seatbelts would get more people to actually use them, but I think it was later shown that they didn’t actually improve safety.
As I recall, someone won the big prize on one episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos showing some guy being almost strangled and his head grabbed by that automatic shoulder harness closing on him.
I can go along with those, but a seat belt wont ruin it.
My Dad had a Pontiac Tempest, which did not come with seat belts but he had them installed anyway.
Some googling shows CA has a 1964 cut off, if the seat belts were never installed.
No, the car had them when it came from the dealership.
I do have to admit that I do not know for certain that they came from the factory, or that they were standard on that car. For all I know, they might have been an option that my father requested, either installed at the factory, or at the dealership.
I do know that the air-conditioning was a dealer-installed option. Interestingly, some time after that car passed away, I was thumbing through the owner’s manual, which mentioned the dealer-installed air-conditioning option. There was a footnote that said taught it could not be installed in six-cylinder station wagons. I guess our dealer didn’t know that it was impossible to install that air-conditioning in that car, so he went ahead and did it. Sort of like an old cliché that asserts that a bumblebee is aerodynamically incapable of flight, but since the bumblebee doesn’t know this, it goes ahead and flies anyway.
Buying a car was a lot different then, the idea of “standard options” packages didn’t really exist. If you wanted a V6 and a 3 speed column shift transmission painted orange with blue interior, you could order it, and they would do that for you. Everything on the invoice was a line item and cost money, and so even things like passenger side arm-rests, sun visors, and side view mirrors were not standard, they were extra-cost options. Bare bones nothing extra cars were called “strips” apparently. Pickup trucks were not shipped with rear bumpers, those were extra cost too, or supplied locally. If you lived in say Florida, you might even buy a car without a heater. A/C was relatively very expensive and added quite a bit to the price of a car.
So there might be 3 or 4 different transmission options, each one with a different price. I remember hearing about a friend of my father’s who had bought a Honda CVCC when they first came out. For entertainment purposes when he was bored (this was during the second round of punishing high oil prices and rampant monetary inflation) he would take the CVCC out to new car dealers and tell them he wanted to trade it in on a new station wagon or some POS like that. They were sitting on a huge pile of basically unsalable huge 70’s boats, so they were salivating.
He would go over each line on the car he wanted to “buy”. "Oh, I’m not paying for that’. Of course they would agree to just about anything to make the sale, there is some allowance for dickering, but he knew how to press all the buttons and start arguing. “What do you mean I got to pay extra for that? Doesn’t this car come with a transmission?”