Yes, I know that the law says I must wear a seat belt on a public street, but lets just say that I want to ride on my private ranch, or live in New Hampshire where no seat belt laws apply. Remember this is GQ, so the purpose of this thread is not auto safety, but simply the question at hand.
I don’t think it is illegal to disable these spawns of Satan himself, but if for some reason it is, I’ll ask the mods to close this thread.
So, I’ve got a 2015 Kia Sorrento and if I drive 10 feet down the access road of my sprawling privately owned ranch without me or the front seat passenger buckling the seat belt, I hear the familiar “ding, ding, ding, ding, DING, DING, fuckyoudriverputonyourseatbelt, DING, DING, DING”
Is there any way to program the internal computer/sensor/dinger so that it doesn’t make that sound any more or otherwise monitor my seat belt usage?
There is also no way to stop your car from locking you inside in that ten second drive through your pasture, either. For your safety. You never know what thugs may be lying in wait to accost you.
On edit I realized New Hampshire. I didn’t want to advocate breaking the law, so for the purposes of this thread, I want to drive in New Hampshire without a seat belt and the annoying chime. Auto-locking is a good point as well. There is no ready way to disable this either.
Is there a way to disable “features” like this in general? Can a laptop be plugged into a car’s computer port and turn the feature from “on” to “off”? Does it differ by car model? Is it illegal to tamper with this stuff?
I guess a related question is why is all of that crap in there to begin with? I don’t remember one single consumer complaining that they had forgotten to buckle up and demanding that car manufacturers install these annoying things.
Wll I suppose you could fasten the seatbelt before you get in the car. All the computer wants is to know that tab A has been inserted forcefully into slot B. It doesn’t care of the strap is around you or pinned between your back and the seat.
ETA: monkeying with the safety gear would have a detremental effect on the car’s value should you sell it, and on you should a buyer not realize the warning chime is disabled and suffer injury as a result of forgetting to use the seatbelt.
Some performance tuners like Bullydog, allow you to change the way some of the lights and warning alarms work. I would be surprised if anybody made one for a 2015 Kia however.
It should be noted that some models merely ding a couple of times and then settle for a dashboard warning light. Others ding and squawk repetitively to warn of the horrible danger you are in by releasing the belt so you can get to the card in your wallet that activates the parking garage card reader.
I would like to permanently disable my car’s “anti-slip” mechanism that works by cutting off engine power to the rear wheels when it detects any sliding (you have to remember to turn the damn thing off each time you start the car in winter). I can handle driving on slippery roads and know what to do if a skid starts. I don’t like being left unable to maneuver through the tiniest bit of snow or ice because the wheels aren’t turning.
Another thing pops into my mind. Every time I start the car, the display has a disclaimer that I should never do anything on this screen while operating the car, and I must touch “AGREE” every goddamn time.
Is there a place where I can always and forever agree that I won’t do such a thing so I don’t have to touch it every time?
On older cars, disabling the seat belt nagger by just cutting and jumping the wires into the belt receiver was pretty easy. The problem with doing that now (or disabling the seat belt sensor in any other way) is that with modern airbags, the computer uses the same sensor to determine whether someone is buckled or not which is part of how it decides whether to fire the airbags at full power or not, so it is genuinely dangerous to drive around with it disabled. Although I guess if you are driving around without your seatbelt that may not be a high priority.
I think the best way to temporarily disable it would be to grab a spare seatbelt buckle from a junkyard and leave it in the cupholder or something so you can just buckle it in when you feel like living on the wild side. The sensor just works by detecting continuity across the metal buckle, so the buckle from any old Kia (or Hyundai?) ought to work.
Auto-locking can definitely be disabled - on at least some cars. My 2009 Honda Odyssey’s owner’s manual details the procedure for altering the default behavior - I don’t remember the steps, but they exist.
There are scads of dummy seat belt buckles on eBay that one can plug into the seat belt “socket” to keep the chiming away. Yours with free shipping for about six bucks from China. Look for something like “seat belt stop alarm Kia 2015”
Not sure its exactly that easy, but I figure that the seat belt chime is simply a wav file. When ever I get around to it, I am just going to replace that with a white noise wav, and let it go its merry way. The problem would be in finding it.
I live in Ontario, and could care less if its ilegal. A simple reversal would suffice for trade ins or private sale to bring it back up to code.
Marketing to make a particular vehicle safer, and the competition follows like lemmings, at least its not like those cars in the nineties, that were constantly blaring, you door is ajar or some such.
At one time it was as easy as pulling a single fuse. But I’ve noticed that most cars now days have multiple functions on the fuses. Which means if you pull the seat belt chime fuse your radio or something else might be defunct too.
So I’d go with the the dummy buckle that was previously mentioned.
I’m betting you better check with your insurance company before you monkey with that chime. You may (or may not) find that it violates some obscure provision in your policy.
not easily. Beltminder alarms are an FMVSS requirement. you can disable them on your own car, but manufacturers have incentives to make doing so as difficult as possible.
It’s not a case of fuses having multiple functions, but that the chimes are generated by other modules. Most cars have the welcome and warning chimes generated and played by the gauge cluster, and some (BMW, Mercedes, GM, Ford) are using the radio to generate chimes and play them through the stereo speakers.
I’d like to throw in another stupid aspect seat belt nags have: obnoxiously low weight requirements. I buy a gallon of milk and place in on the front seat. The sensors pick this up and start bitching at my liquid passenger to put its seat belt on. A gallon of milk weighs about eight pounds. The only humans who weigh eight pounds are newborn babies; if I have one of those in the front seat, I’m engaging in child endangerment. We live in a very weird world when the great political compromise of the day is the Drunken, Darwinian Nanny State.
On a more positive note…
This one, at least, I have a solution for, though it requires a specific design and you’re not going to like it. A few weeks ago, my father brought his car in for repair, and the loaner they gave him not only had auto-locking, but it had no manual disengaging mechanism- no plunger or rocker, like every other car I’ve ever been in. So what you need to do is:
Get a car of that type.
While locked in, experience an electrical shutdown that sets the car on fire and leaves you unable to escape.
Burn to death.
Wait for the inevitable lawsuit that makes the practice illegal.
Easy perhaps, but not fool proof. Or at least not for my less-than-mechanically-inclined father. He tried to disable the seatbelt alarm on our (year approximate) 1976 Pontiac, because he always put it on automatically, but he ended up disabling the shutoffso that it made noise, constantly unless all seats in the car were buckled. Front and rear. So we had to buckle our seatbelts back up when leaving the car.
PS I was 8 or 9 years old at the time so I may have some details kind of fuzzy.
