Had a girlfriend when I was in highschool who was too old for me, had an old Chevy Blazer and loved the Cake song Stickshifts and Safetybelts. Everything about her was fun on a bench seat.
I can both smell and hear this picture.
Ooh, same. And I can viscerally feel the seats and dash etc. The weight of the wheel when you sit and bounce on the springy seats trying to turn the wheel from side to side, and it’s so heavy. The creaking squeak sound of the windows as you turn the handle. The great thunk of the door, with it’s steel weight and loud creak. My dad owned one of these for a small time when I was a kid, because he’s a car enthusiast. There were no seatbelts in the back, so us 3 kids thought it was hilarious to slide all the way to each side of the car (mostly uncontrollably, but with added emphasis) every time it turned a corner. Dad didn’t own the car long. No idea why. I remember him getting quite frustrated with us, but we were having so much fun we just laughed. I think he gave up on getting through to us. But don’t feel bad for poor Dad, he goes on to invest and enjoy some marvellous cars over the coming decades, including helping his son, the youngest of us all, become a race car driver, coincidentally, of an older car model.
Dying horribly being mangled by your own car as you bounce around, so sexy!
/s
Road head must have been so much better back in the day.
It was. As was watching the submarine races since there were multiple viable, errr, seating arrangements. A glorious time to be alive.
As was watching the submarine races
… This sounds like a euphemism uh… Beyond my depth.
Puns aside: …Wat? Lol
Just please don’t bring back the metal seatbelt that branded you in the summer months.
We used be a strong species. Now look at us.
The MANAGER that made the engineer get rid of them clearly had neither. FTFY.
Cute dogs and good girls
Drop speed limits back down to 50mph and you’ve got a deal
You need 30kmph for it to be safe, and I’m talking proper 30 kmph, not “the sign says 30 but the road is straight and I feel quite safe being two drinks in” 30 kmph
Sounds like a win/win.
forgive me, but i have to ask. how does speed affect the type of seat that is used?
had an 83 f100. the first time I took a turn too fast I got thrown into the passenger seat.
I’m lucky it was a back road and I had legs long enough to still press the brake enough to slow down enough to get back into the driver seat and carry on.
wasn’t long after that and I got a newer truck with bucket seats.
sure, benches were fun and easy to
fucksleep on but the safety trade off made it an easy choice to make.No seat belts?
I’m sure it had one, once.
keep in mind this was an f100. it had lights, wheels, a windshield, and a steering wheel. I was lucky it had a radio and heat. zero power steering.
so when you turned, you had to put everything into the turn. that day I just didn’t have enough for the turn and to stay seated.
Yeah I had a manual steering car before, it sucks. I had a wrist cast and almost at the end of the cast time I was turning the steering and felt the bone crack again.
Not a car expert, but i presume that actual seats provide more stability when turning/ more safety when having an accident. Both of which gets worse when speed increases.
that was my first thought too, but i dont recall ever taking corners that sharp at 60 or 50 mph.
edit - oop i missed the part you said better safety for crashes, that sounds reasonable, and im curious about how its more safe.
Modern cars bend and flex during a crash, and they do it in such a way to keep occupants safer. Bench seats can’t do that as well. They also don’t work as well with modern air bags and seatbelts, and they often lack headrests.
Without a headrest a relatively low speed impact basically snaps your neck and whips your head into the dashboard.You want your seat to basically hug you and lock you into place. There’s a reason racecar seats look like they do.
Airbags and shoulder harness seat belts are a lot easier to place with bucket seats.
that makes sense
Car accidents. All collision types become more likely as speed increases, and injuries increase with that - not chance of injury, total injuries. Bench seats were abandoned for bucket seats because bench seats are objectively more deadly when analyzing car crashes.
You need to limit the speed a vehicle can go if you’re going to make unsafe designs acceptable again, otherwise you’re just gambling with lives for fun cabin interiors.
Can’t adjust the seat properly. Passengers slide more easily when cornering. More material required for upholstery and padding.
As someone who has had both, bucket seats are way better than bench seats.
The bucket seats have all that material and padding down each side so I don’t think that point stands.
Bench seats have material and padding all across the middle of the whole car…
the material cost is basically negligible in this comparison. it’s the component count in the assembly that matters. and two complex seats are way more expensive than one moderately complex bigger seat.
The cost on 2 bucket seats is way higher than a single bench. Separate controls, hinges, reclining mechanisms, headrests,
For comfort, there is no question, bucket seats reign supreme.
TBF, being of an age that i’ve had both, I’ll take a bucket seat and good AC over a bench seat. If my girl needs to be that close to me, we’re going to be in the back seat :)
the back seat of a truck? how big are trucks these days holy
Cars used to have bench seats too.
But that’s divided between three seats, not two, so the material per seat is less.
And dogs at least can do okay with bucket seats. I drove an Oldsmobile Silhouette ^(the Cadillac of minivans!)^ for years, and my dog was just tall enough that he could sit between the driver and passenger seats and look out the front windshield. He was at the perfect height for head scritches while I drove down the highway.
I remember when he got a bit too hefty to sit there comfortably. The automatic seat adjustment controls were on the right side of the driver seat and one time I suddenly found myself being pushed into the steering wheel at a stop light. His jelly rolls had started pressing in on the little joystick.
I miss that dog. The van was just okay.
It’s all good until safety is a consideration
This exactly.
Bench seats are great for hanging out with afore mentioned dog and/or girl.
Bench seats are super shitty in any sort of side impact collision. There’s nothing keeping you in place except your safety belt.What additional factors does a bucket seat have to keep you in place during a side impact that a bench seat doesn’t? I don’t imagine the extra shoulder rest material really doing that much work.
actually that little extra material makes a big difference.
Look at it from the side (IE put a camera where your spine would be), same on the bottom where your leg would be. There’s several good square inches of ‘wall’, much more than just a seat belt.
And while it is angled up somewhat, the seat belt is doing a great job pulling you back down into it.
Sliding around is one part, the other is the lack of functional headrests in old trucks.
Idk GMC smoking crack putting those fakers in my 1994 K1500, they’re below my neck and not adjustable. Regulatory compromise, no care.
I mean, isn’t that what the seat belt is for? I can’t imagine the typical front seat in a modern car keeping you put in a collision either. They’re definitely shaped comfort-first, and at best keep you from jostling around on uneven roads.
I think they’re talking about sideways motion. Seat belts do their big part but the seat can stop you from going off one side when the belt presses you into it.
It’s one of the benefits of a bucket seat, and you’ll note front seats have a bucket shape both on the back and the bottom. This does a LOT to keep a human in place, especially if the seatbelt is holding the human down into the bucket. Lots of surface area on the side of the leg and torso for the bucket shape. OTOH with a bench seat there’s nothing at all keeping the human in place, there’s just the 3 places where the strap crosses the human and those don’t do very much. Seat belts are designed to keep you down in the seat.
TIL
Thank you modern engineering
That’s why I got the car with naturally aspirated 460hp. The bucket seats. Safety first every time!
Most passenger cars don’t really have bucket seats. Bucket seats like in race cars have hard, deep structural sides, whereas in passenger cars they’re just soft pillows in a very shallow bucket shape. This is obviously because getting in and out of an actual bucket seat is difficult and consumers don’t like it. Because the pillows are soft, they’re not going to stop you from sliding out in an impact.
I imagine the vaguely bucket shape of modern passenger cars has basically nothing to do with safety, at least not in the “stops you from flying sideways out of your seat” sense, and is mostly just a comfort thing.
Honda bucket seats are much deeper than say a random US model. Not talking about racing buckets.
I drove a Mercedes a few months ago for a work rental. Terrible hard flat seats like sitting on a park bench
Having been in accidents in both a bench seat and regular car seat. I can say the car seat did a much better job of keeping my ass in place. Though having the center console to brace against may also have played a part in that.
Those are both bucket seats, just to different degrees.
Imagine a camera placed where the spine or leg is looking at the side of the seat. Look at how much exposed surface area faces the camera. Let’s call that surface area the ‘side restraint component’. (IE, if the side panel comes ‘up’ out of the seat 2", and extends out 4", the side restraint component is 2").
On a seat belt, you’ve got about 2" x 4" surface area on each side. So 8 square inches on each side. That’s all a bench seat gives you.
On that car seat you’ve got about 2.5" x 8" on the back, plus an average of let’s call it 2.5" x 4" on the seat. So that’s about 30 square inches on each side.
On the racing seat you’ve got about 14" x 20", but cut in half as a triangle, and let’s say the shoulder bit fills in the missing part by the belt opening. So call that 140 square inches per side.
The car seat may be designed for comfort, but the side bolsters do have a restraint effect.
And yet I find them uncomfortable as hell! For long drives anyway. The headrest bends your head forward, so then you’re forced to recline the seat to counteract it. Even your arms go a bit forward due to the bucket shape. I get the safety reasons, just can’t stand the bad posture.
We rented a van last year and only the front seats were bucket seats, the backseat of our car is a bench seat too. In both cases they’re not smooth across the back anymore like the one in the picture, all modern bench seats have divots too.
Then why is the middle seat the safest car seat?
People rarely sit there without someone on either side acting as a buffer
If you mean the middle rear, probably because there’s nothing in front of you. It may be the safest overall, not necessarily the safest in a side impact.
Cute girls > Safety
This is a fundamental law of nature I believe.
We are literally programmed (via neurochemistry) to have reduced concerns about safety in the presence of cute girls. A cute girl literally has more effect on ur brain chemistry than some drugs.
Inject cute girls and boys directly into my veins
Safety goes out the window when you realize that hiway blowjobs are a thing.
That won’t be the only thing going out the window when/if a crash happens.
Safety goes out the window when you realize that hiway blowjobs are a thing.
I have never met a country boy who’s first concern was safety.
Add a fold-down console that locks into place safely in the middle.
Best of both worlds.
Yeah because that engineers cute girl and dog probably died in a T bone accident.
“Ah don’t wear a seatbelt because muh sisters cousins friends uncles neighbors mechanics grandaddys brother died while he was wearing a seatbelt and couldn’t get out of the vehicle in time to avoid the freight train that he was too blind and deaf to see or hear coming.”
People shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to. Constantly being hypervigilant, prepared for the worst case scenario, thinking you have zero control over whether you get in a deadly accident is bad for the psychological health of our society.
Before seat belt laws there wasn’t even a word for road rage. It didn’t exist because when someone accidentally swerved into your lane or cut you off it didn’t feel like attempted murder.
In 1971, it was hold me close tiny dancer and count the lights on the highway. Today it’s stay over there tiny dancer and stay strapped into your bucket seat just on the off chance we get into a horrible accident. We’re driving ourselves batty with this kind of paranoia.
Why was a blind/def person driving to begin with?
“He wudn’t, his preacher’s side-piece’s son’s 2nd step-daddy was drivin’ shit-faced n flew through the windshield so he coon’t help”
Fwiw, there’s seatbelts in that image. If you wanted to sit closer, you could cross the right belt over and buckle it into the left buckle, and buckle the left belt into the right one. You could use the same method to secure a 3rd person in the middle. As long as nobody’s too fat.
Stickshifts and safetybelts, bucketseats have all got to go, when we’re driving in my car, they make my baby feel so far
I NEED. YOU HERE WITH ME. NOT WAY OVER IN A BUCKET SEAT.
I love CAKE, definitely my favorite band. Did you know they give out tree saplings at their concerts?
Cake is awesome. I heard about the tree saplings.
…and now I have that song stuck in my head.
What song is it?
Stickshifts and Safety Belts by Cake.
That’s certainly a song of all time
Exactly how the people in the music video for Short Skirt Long Jacket reacted
I miss my Buick. Thing was like a couch in the front.
Yeah, we had a friend with a Toyota Avalon that had a bench front seat. Cruised many blunts in that car as a young man, just three dudes crammed into the front seat of a sedan. We were asking for it, but fortunately avoided it.
That is the only positive thing I can recall about our old Buick. The front couch was super comfy. Column shifter was pretty sweet too
cake felt so strongly about it that they wrote a song
Came here to say the same.
