(Please note, I am not the seller of the car listed below)
Maybe someone can shed some light on this. Below is an eBay link for a 1979 Chrysler Cordoba that I was looking at.
About 1/2 way down through the pictures is a shot of the front seats. This car has the standard 3-point seatbelts, just like every Cordoba ever made. However, in addition to the regular front shoulder/lap belt combo, there’s an additional lap belt that can be buckled separately from the shoulder belt.
Note that this isn’t the type of seatbelts that GM had in the late 60s/early 70s that had a shoulder belt that buckled separately. This is a totally separate lap belt the looks like it plugs into the same place that the 3-point belt would plug into.
The best suggestion I could get was that the original owner had some sort of physical problem that prevented him/her from using a shoulder belt and the dealer might’ve installed accessory lap belts.
I’ve seen hundreds of Cordobas with every combination of options and I’ve never seen this in another one. The seller seems to be one of these estate-sale type auctioneers and I wouldn’t expect them to know anything about it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/18-120-Actual-Mile-Red-Red-1979-Chrysler-Cordoba-/280545662157?pt=US_Cars_Trucks
Wow, that car’s gorgeous! If I only had an extra thirteen thousand sitting around.
Anyway, I’ve never seen anything like that before either. Very unusual.
I’m not so sure I’m on board with your theory of the previous owner having a physical problem. I think if that were the case, it would only be on the driver’s side. Although it’s certainly possible the owner would put them on both sides for times when he/she would ride as a passenger, or even just for symmetry.
I’m going to guess the car was bought by an older person (or couple) who wore their seat belts, but didn’t care for the newfangled (at that time) shoulder belts.
So they could have just had the dealer’s parts department order the belts for the rear seat, and install them using the bolts for the original belts.
You’d think that if this were the case, though, that they would have removed the shoulder belts. Maybe they left them in place for other drivers, or maybe they didn’t like the blank hole that would have been left.
Isn’t that for the center passenger?
jnglmassiv is right. It’s the lap belt. The arm rest folds up and a third person can sit in the front seat. My Cadillac has one of those as well. It helps if the third person is fairly small (like a child) otherwise the front seat gets really crowded with three people in it.
No, look again. There are two belts at each side. One on the seat, and the shoulder unit.
I have never seen that before.
I had a 78 Plymouth Volare years ago, it had the same belts. You had the option of driving with a lap belt only or with the lap and shoulder harness combo. In my car, the lap only belts were stuffed under the front seat and never used.
In these pictures, I see one shoulder belt and one lap belt on each side, plus one more lap belt on the driver’s side near the center. I only see two receptacles for buckles, however, so I’m baffled. The third lap belt seems likely to be for a center passenger, but hard to tell without the extra receptacles.
But the lap belts are separate anyway so there is no need for an extra driver’s lap belt as speculated in the OP.
I believe this arrangement predated the federal requirement for passive restraints and was quite common. You could buckle just the lap belt if you wanted (or neither, for that matter). Then passive restraints became required, which came in the form of things like shoulder belts that attached to the door so they closed on you, or powered on tracks along the roofline so they slid up on you when the car started. All of this jazz was ultimately replaced by air bags. (I worked for Ford in 1979-83 and spent a year writing software in support of safety engineering.) I don’t know if federal regs require an integrated shoulder belt now or if it has just become an industry standard.
ETA: I just realized that the shoulder belt here is a combo shoulder/lap belt, not just a shoulder belt. Racer72 appears to have the right answer, especially since it’s also a Chrysler/Plymouth.
It’s definitely got nothing to do with the center seatbelt, as that was attached on either side of the armrest.
The armrest was an option. some of the cars had a center console with a floor shifter, but…and this once again is just from looking at hundreds of old Chryslers…when the center armrest with the “buddy seat” was installed, so was the center belt. The center belt and receptacle attached to the same bolts as the driver’s and passenger’s receptacles. The “buddy seat” was only about 10" wide, so it was really only practical for a little kid to sit there, and most of the time, the kid would ride on the armrest for a better view anyway (this was the 70s, remember?)
I thought shoulder belts were required equipment as of 1977 or 1978 but it may have been early 80s. Before they were required, it was legal to remove the seatbelts if you didn’t want them in the car and I’ve seen three cases where this was done. The cars are still legal today without seatbelts, as long as they were manufactured before nnnn year.
There may have been an option for the lap belts for people who didn’t want shoulder belts, as long as the shoulder belts were installed. Just because they had to install 'em didn’t mean people used 'em. Here, there was no law requiring their use until 1988, which was the year I got my first driver’s license.
Racer72, are you old enough to have bought that Volare new? I’m just curious as to how they would’ve listed that as an accessory.
I still can’t believe in 10+ years of looking at old Chryslers on eBay, owning a number of them, and crawling through dozens of junkyard cars, that I’ve never seen this before.
Maybe in some jurisdictions, but seatbelt laws can be on the municipal level, and I wouldn’t want to bet that every single municipality in the country put in the same grandfather clause.