I can’t fathom why you’d ever want to drive or ride in a car without wearing a seatbelt. There is no situation in the world where it’s safer to be unbelted. Even if you’re the safest, most cautious driver on the planet, there’s no stopping a reckless driver from crossing into your lane or running a stop light and hitting you. In that case, wearing a seatbelt could mean the difference between a few bruises and a life-changing injury. It’s never worth the risk.
Yet, 9% of all front-seat occupants did not use their seatbelts last year, according to data obtained by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The number is even worse for back-seat passengers, where seatbelt use was just 80 percent in 2023.
Proof that seatbelts save lives is easy to find. From the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration:
In 2023, 23,959 passenger vehicle occupants were killed. Nearly 50% of those killed were not buckled (based on known seat belt use).
Seat belts saved an estimated 14,955 lives and could have saved an additional 2,549 people if they had been wearing seat belts, in 2017 alone.
The NHTSA also points out that buckling up in the front seat reduces your risk of fatal injury by 45%, and chances of a moderate to critical injury by 50%. Despite years’ worth of overwhelming data like this, some automakers still make it too easy to disable the annoying chime that comes with driving without your seatbelt.
Ah Yes, That Chime
The installation of seatbelts became mandatory for all passenger cars in the United States in 1968, but it wasn’t until 1984 did the first state—New York—make the use of seatbelts in the front seats mandatory. By 1995, 48 other states had seatbelt usage laws in place. New Hampshire remains the only state in the Union not to have such a law.
The seatbelt-reminder chime for drivers wouldn’t become mandatory until 1972, when only 20% of drivers were actually wearing their belts. Eventually, the chime requirement moved to all front-seat passengers. And it wasn’t until 2024 when the NHTSA finalized a rule that will require automakers to have chimes for rear-seat occupants not wearing their belts, which is set to go into effect in 2027.
Anyone who’s ridden in a car without a seatbelt will know how annoying these chimes can be. Being bothersome is, of course, the whole point of the noise. It incentivizes occupants to buckle up so as to stop the noise from blaring through the speaker system. The majority of occupants simply buckle up, but as the data shows, there are still a fair number of people who decide not to.
I’m Shocked Automakers Still Have These Features Built-In
I bring all of this up because of a TikTok I came across a few days ago showing a procedure of how to disable the seatbelt-reminder chime in a brand-new Toyota GR86. I suspected it might involve some parts-swapping and ECU trickery, but no—being able to turn off the chime is a built-in feature on new Subaru-built cars like this ’86.
@pushingpistons You can do this with a similar process for other cars and sometimes it’s actually very useful. BUT PLEASE ALWAYS WEAR YOUR SEAT BELT WHEN DRIVING ????#carsoftiktokcontest ♬ original sound – pushing pistons
And it’s not like disabling the noise is some sort of impossibly tricky set of cheat-code button press patterns, either. All you have to do is put the car into accessory mode (press the start button twice without putting your foot on the brake) and buckle/unbuckle the belt 20 times within 30 seconds. That’s it! The chime goes away. It takes no time at all and requires no special skills, tools, or parts.
Subaru isn’t the only manufacturer that has a built-in way to disable the chime. Ford has a similar trick for its new vehicles that involves the same buckle/unbuckle trick. At least you have to put on the handbrake for this version. Here’s the full tutorial, ironically shared by a Ford dealership on Facebook:
Some later-model Toyotas have a trick too, where you can actually activate a secret menu in the gauge cluster to switch between having the chime on or off when the seatbelt isn’t buckled:
Stuff like this, where it takes under a minute to disable the sound without having to spend money on extra tools, feels wrong to see built into a new car. The above videos point out reasons you might want to disable the chime—if you’re wearing a five-point harness on a race track, if you’re driving down your driveway to your mailbox, if you’re driving at low speeds on a farm, or if you’re carrying something heavy in the passenger seat. While I understand not wanting to have the beep going during those times, I don’t think those excuses are strong enough.
If you really want to disable the alerts, there are simpler solutions, like those seatbelt-shaped clips that are basically buckles without the belt, designed to fit into the latch specifically to trick the car into thinking the seatbelt is buckled. You can also just pull the old trick of buckling the seat belt before you get in the car, then just sit on top of the belt. It’s kind of weird to see manufacturers programming this stuff into their cars to make it easier in the year 2025. Shouldn’t it be as hard as possible to disable a safety feature like this?
Automakers Should Go Even Further
Back in 1973, the NHTSA introduced a law that required all new cars to have a seatbelt interlock mechanism, requiring the driver’s and right-seat passenger’s seatbelts to be buckled before the car would start. Seeing as how around 20% of people wore their belts, this caused a bit of a stir. From History:
“An enormous political backlash ensued,” says Jerry Mashaw, professor emeritus at the Yale Law School and co-author of The Struggle for Auto Safety. “Congress received more letters from Americans complaining about [the interlock mechanism] than they did about Nixon’s ‘Saturday Night Massacre.’”
Congress responded swiftly in 1974 by killing the interlock mechanism and further mandating that the annoying buzzing sound that indicated an unlatched seat belt could only last eight seconds.
The NHTSA didn’t give up on seat belts, though. It passed a new rule in 1977 that put the ball squarely in the automakers’ court. Detroit had to install some kind of “passive restraint”—a system that worked automatically without driver intervention—that would protect a crash test dummy from damage when hitting a wall at 35 mph.
That new rule led to the infamous “automatic safety belts” of the late 1970s, which swiveled around the driver upon entry. These also upset buyers:
Consumers immediately began arguing that automatic seat belts were unsafe in a car fire, potentially trapping passengers in a burning car. Carmakers agreed to add a release latch, which drivers could easily disconnect, rendering the automatic belt ineffective.
As this back-and-forth was going on, Ronald Regan won the presidency in 1980, with one of his administration’s first moves being to rescind the NHTSA’s rules on passive restraints. That move proved fruitless, as insurance companies sued to keep the rules in place, winning in the Supreme Court. Elizabeth Dole, then Secretary of the Department of Transportation, formulated a compromise that could satisfy everyone:
Dole issued a rule in 1985 that required automakers to install driver’s side airbags in all new cars unless—and this is the kicker—two-thirds of the states passed mandatory seat belt laws by April 1, 1989. Dole’s rule was so politically adroit because it looked like a regulation, but was really a gift to the auto industry. Cars already had seat belts, so all Detroit had to do was convince states to pass mandatory seat belt laws and it was off the hook for installing expensive air bags or automatic belts.
Automakers weren’t able to convince enough states to sign on with seatbelt laws, so driver’s side airbags were made standard in 1989. Eventually, though, 49 states introduced some kind of seatbelt law. So in the end, everyone got their wish (except for the people who didn’t want to wear seatbelts, I guess).
I suspect that if a seatbelt interlocking mechanism law were introduced today, it would face far less pushback. It only requires a few lines of code, so it wouldn’t be expensive or difficult to implement. And with 91% of people in America already wearing seatbelts, the population that would be affected by the rule would be much smaller. Such a law would certainly save lives. It’s just a matter of getting the right people to get behind it. I know I would be.
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
My ’89 Ford has a simple light that comes on in the dash that says FASTEN BELTS when the car is started with a few dings and then turns off. It’s in no way tied to the actual seatbelts. I never even associated it the dings with the actual seatbelts, always thought it was just dinging to tell you you put it in run instead of accessory.
I’ve seen from Honda owners the actual electronics in a seatbelt connector go bad on nearly 20 year old cars with limited parts availability, so I would NOT recommend an interlock.
An interlock is not the way to go. Unless you also require them to be warrantied for life and car manufacturers have to pay for all costs incurred when they fail (including rideshare and/or rental cars when they fail when the person is trying to get to work).
That I can’t fathom driving without a seatbelt is exactly why the idiotic reminder chimes are disabled on my two BMWs. I don’t need the thing dinging at me simply because I am sitting there with the ignition on listening to the radio or reading codes or whatever. I did leave the warning light enabled, just not the chime.
I doubt an interlock would save many lives. The idiots who hate seatbelts would just buckle them and sit on them or whatever. Making not wearing them a primary offense and pulling people over and fining them is the best thing we ever did for seatbelt usage. My late grandmother refused to do it until it was made illegal not to, then she did. I was her interlock – if I was driving, I would start the car until she buckled up before the law was enacted.
An interlock is a dangerous idea… As a former millwright, I can tell you that the single most common cause of a machine failing is a bad or misadjusted interlock or limit switch.
A car refusing to start because a 50¢ switch in the seat buckle failed is unconscionable.
But aren’t most car failures ultimately due to the failure of a $0.50 part? I understand this would add an additional failure point, however I’ve never been in a car that failed to register when the seatbelt was buckled. I’m sure it can happen– I just don’t think it would be a major problem. Maybe it’s naive, but I’d like to think that if the switch became “mission-critical” OEMs would splurge for the $0.60 version.
I thought the same thing – perhaps a belt-off speed limiter of 35mph would be enough to enforce action, while still not leaving someone completely stranded.
I have no desire to not-wear a seat belt, and I have no desire to accommodate people who do (without some actual reason beyond “it’s mildly inconvenient”).
The idea of legally-mandated “lines of code” to lock out functions of my car would anger me immensely. There are already too many digital compromises, and too many forms of “DRM” in modern cars. The fewer of those the better.
Require cars with “AI assistants” to vocally harass people without seatbelts, without requiring “AI assistants” to be actually included in cars, and I’ll call it even.
Someone said “I feel naked driving without my seat belt”, and I would agree.
So, think of it this way: We generally agree that it’s best for everyone to wear clothes outside of their homes. There are few situations that justify not-wearing clothes in public.
However, if it was legally required that every new house be built with a door that detects whether a person is wearing clothes before allowing them to go outside, everyone would riot.
Brian, you are missing the point. I wear my seat belt 100% of the time, so does my wife, the only other driver of my car. The chime is an annoying nuisance for folks like us. You probably brush your teeth every day, but would you like to get a SMS every day from your toothbrush reminding you to brush your teeth?
At a certain point, I feel the car manufacturers have taken sufficient steps to encourage seatbelt use and pretty sure we are there. Let’s assume if you have to be buckled to start, once you get moving, it’d be idiotic to interfere with operation if someone unbuckled. I expect it’d be an easy workaround for an interlock.
That’s a good point. I imagine drive-thrus would also be deeply aggravating (for those of us who unbuckle to better reach or get to our wallets).
For the one year interlocks were mandated, people would just buckle the belt and sit on them.
I thought one of the core tenets of the “style guide” of this website was not to tell people what to do or think. The topic of the article is quite appropriate, but the needless preaching and judging is not appreciated.
There are numerous reasons not to wear a seat belt – you listed many of them and the comments are FULL of them (so it seems most commenters disagree with you). When I am driving my pickup on my 45 acre farm and loading brush, branches, or anything else in the bed and getting in and out of the car 30 times in a row, I’m not going to buckle up. I’m on private land with no other cars and drive about 10mph. Likewise with shuffling cars around the driveway or putting an object on the seat might be other reasons.
Please keep your personal responsibility lectures to yourself – that is not why we come to this website.
100% agree
I wear my seatbelt every time, every drive. It saved my life when I totaled my first car at 16. I will never forget that lesson. That said…
I don’t need an obnoxious chime to remind me to do so. I also don’t need an obnoxious chime banging away in my ear when I want to move my car around the driveway. Or sit in a running car with A/C on waiting for my wife to come out of the house, or a store etc. I absolutely did the 20 clicks in 30 seconds hack to disable my WRX chime.
If people are determined to not wear a seatbelt a chime isn’t going to make them. That last 9% is proof. If they can’t disable it through a menu or other bypass, they will just get a loose buckle and snap it in.
I remember a statistics professor tell the class that, whenever we look at polls, keep in mind that 10% of Americans are batshit and we shouldn’t be alarmed when a poll reports 10% of Americans favor nuking Canada. My point is, getting seatbelt usage to 90% is incredibly impressive, and probably about as high as we can expect to get to.
I never got the concept of actually driving without your seatbelt. I can get the whole driveway type thing and all that.
I think for the chimes it’d be so much better to have a chime going into gear, and then incessantly chime at you while you’re over 15mph unbuckled. My stupid Chrysler van is so annoying in that it’ll beep at me when I’m not even going 5 mph, and at seemingly random intervals on the few instances where I just have to move it.
I just found out a coworker doesn’t wear his. The excuse? “I grew up in Kentucky, when it wasn’t necessary.”
I just responded with, “Yeah, so did I, but common sense required its use.”
That’s actually how my Mercedes works. I think it’s one chime and the lit light when you start it, and then silence until you go over Xmph, at which point the chime goes mental and the warning light flashes. THAT I can live with. My BMWs were like your van, bong, bong, bong incessantly – so it got coded out ASAP.
My dog is right at the tipping point weight wise.. So literally if I pet her head, it triggers the passenger switch and the chime goes off. I generally clip her leash into the seatbelt buckle (special bungie thingie) but then the airbag is armed, so neither it perfect. I’ve been driving since the 80s and never needed a reminder, IMO if you do you’re too stupid to be allowed to drive.
I’m 100% pro-seatbelt, but also against the vehicle nagging me about them. Sometimes I’m on farm roads going 10 MPH by myself and don’t need to buckle up, it’s ok, I am an adult and can decide when I need to belt up.
Does the author also need two different chimes to remind him to inhale and exhale, respectively?
None of my cars have chimes, or even a light, but I’ve not once driven off without belting in.
The same way none of my cars have chimes, or even a light, to remind me to wear clothes.
Number of times I’ve driven in the nude?
0
If one *needs* those chimes and lights, please hand in your licence.
Long comment: sue me!
Used to be a Firefighter / Medic. I have handled well over 100 Motor Vehicle Collisions. Enough that most of them are forgotten. All on rural roads with 55 MPH speed limit.
Absolutely against stupid buzzers and even seat belt laws. My Jag has a warning on the dash, but no buzzer or chime. I didn’t disable it. Maybe the dealer did? Maybe Jaguar’s software is as bad as the Web Host Autopian uses? I don’t know or care. Part of the charm of the car.
I do have a rule in my car: Nobody rides without a belt. I also don’t put dense heavy objects in the passenger compartment. Yeah, saw someone hit in the head by a flying laptop.
I have never seen a crash that was made worse by a seatbelt. Most were made much less serious by wearing a belt. But there are exceptions.
One, like the guy who rammed a parked truck at 55 MPH and got pinned through the seat by a metal bar that was on the truck roof rack. Still dead, but right in his seat.
Or the one where the shitty GM seat belt from the 70’s popped open and he left the front passenger seat, sailed around the passenger compartment, and wound up stuffed under the driver’s seat. Ouch!
Also saw a kid who commited first degree dumbass by driving home drunk with a loaded shotgun in the trunk. Went off the road, hit a device intended to keep debris from plugging a culvert. Went through the windshield. Got a ticket four miles long, including improper transport of a firearm.
And for all the folks who tried to make seatbelt wearing a political thing, I once upon a time worked for a guy who was a very “trendy lefty” Oregon liberal. Engineer. Reasonably intelligent. One of the pioneers of a well known technology.
He had a car with a suplimental restraint system (AKA Airbags). Never wore a belt. Rode with him a few times. Finally asked him how he would like getting hit in the face by George Foreman, because if he got in a collision, that was going to happen. He put on the belt, but didn’t appreciate the information.
“if you’re driving down your driveway to your mailbox”
How many people actually have a driveway long enough to require driving its length?
Rural areas? Most people.
Urban areas? I have a gated condo complex I work in frequently, not so often that I have a gate clicker, but often enough. Whenever I’m there I have to get out, key in a code, then walk back to my car and drive around back to park. I usually don’t buckle up to travel this last 0.1 mile at 5-10 mph. The ding is annoying, but I live with it. I bet there are a ton of people in a situation like this.
We have one centralized mailbox for our cul-de-sac. It’s convenient to swing by it as I’m driving to the house.
Absolutely everywhere here in God’s Waiting room with the incessant gated communities. Mailboxes are pretty universally outside the gate, and some of them are 1000+ homes so they get BIG. The one I stayed in (friend’s place) has a posted *12*mph speed limit. Obviously, 10 would be too slow, and 15 just too darned fast.
They sell garbage can trailer hitch attachments for people having driveways so long that garbage cans are a pain to move so I can believe it.
Never driven on a farm have you.
About 20 years ago I came across two accidents in a four week period where someone had died because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt. With the first one the guy was apparently drunk and a front seat passenger, he got thrown quite clear of the vehicle, had half an arm torn off, plus at least half of his face. The second one was a young woman, on a country road about 6am, she was going around a mild bend and somehow lost control, the vehicle rolled and she got thrown quite a long way, it took me a while to find her and she died just as got to her, neither was a pleasant experience. I always wore seat belts before these events and definitely still do.
My old man became a firm convert to seat belts in the late 60s when he witnessed a head on collision where the passenger went through the windshield and face planted into a rather large tree. Definitely a closed casket situation.
To be honest the easiest built in solution to stop chime is to disconnect the buckle switch from the seat harness. It involves 5 min and basic knowledge of how to unplug a connector. On all the cars that i have fiddled with … the buckle switch is NC and it opens when you put the buckle in.
PS. I use the seatbelt every time and i don’t start until everybody is buckled … but some times the switch dies …
PS2. You know what is more dangerous than disabling the chime … the f***ing chinesium buckles that you can buy to plug so the chime stops … but also allows you to plug the seatbelt …
This is bad advice for newer cars that use Hall sensors. Shorting the wire will create an unexpected output and create a ton of errors. Ask me how I know.
With all due respect, and this is coming from someone who has always worn a seat belt on public roads. Brian keep your extra complex extra annoying junk out of my car that I paid money for. You can certainly pay extra to have your car make extra annoying noises at you when you have boxes in the passenger seat, leave me alone.
The only class I ever flunked was dance class on account of the seatbelt interlock. I had to take dance class to take fencing and acting classes, and I was taking those to learn how to act like a normal person, and because fencing is a great exercise in thinking fast. Acting is also a great exercise in thinking in ways you don’t normally think.
Anyway, in addition to being terrible at following instructions that involve knowing which foot is my left first thing in the morning, one morning I woke up just early enough to drive at breakneck speed and arrive sort of on time for class, only to:
Anyway, I eventually got to class very late and very wet and explained the whole sorry tale and got kicked out of class for making up the stupidest excuse ever.
Stupid interlock.
I eventually got rid of it when I removed the passenger seat to move a bunch of furniture
I am another who wears a seatbelt 100% of the time. Literally every time. However, I disabled the annoying chime in my vehicle, hearing ding ding ding ding dindindindindin DINGDINGDINGDINGSING DIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG is just about the most annoying thing on the planet when just moving my car around the driveway. Could I have bought a whatchamathingy to clip in? Sure, but then I’d have to dig for it anytime I just want to move the car and that’s equally as annoying.
It’s also nice to not have it when I drive on the beach in the summer. Speeds are literally sub 20 mph and I buckle up when getting on the road after airing back up.
It is also nice when backing/hooking up a trailer of the situation involves gettin in and out frequently.
Again, I 100% wear a seatbelt while on the road but it’s so nice to not have my car yelling at me when I’m just moving it 20 feet.
Shortly after buying the ’64 F100 crewcab in ’65 dad put in seatbelts for all six seats. We never left until all of us were belted. They were not required in that truck at that time.
I use my seatbelt every time I drive. Every. Time. Keep that in mind.
I like keeping old vehicles running, and I think the longer we keep things running, the better it is. Old electronic systems fail in old vehicles all the time.
For a while, my car’s electronic door lock stopped working. Then, then other door’s latch sensor failed, indicating that it was always open. I’ve had a trunk sensor fail, leaving an error. None of these meant that I couldn’t drive my car, because I know that the door is closed, but imagine that there were a well-intentioned interlock to ensure a car couldn’t drive when a door was open.
Don’t introduce a failure an unnecessary failure mechanism. The idea of a vehicle being inoperative because an interlock failed is dumb as hell.
Yeah, but I’m telling you that there are very few things as annoying as driving from NYC to Chicago in a 1970s Datsun with a lady’s voice saying “The door is a jar” the entire time.
That sounds like a special level of hell.