Thirty years ago today, in Italy, the obligation to use modern seat belts in private cars was introduced. Someone will remember: old cars did not have them, or they had a version that soon went into disuse. We owe the invention of the belts we still use today to a Swedish engineer who worked for Volvo, and who came up with them in 1959. From then on they were quickly adopted by all car manufacturers, and have probably saved millions since then. of lives.
Car manufacturers faced the problem of introducing an accident safety system only with the spread of cars on a global scale. Until the 1950s, however, the only measure was a belt – called “two-point”, like those of airplanes – which was tied to the driver's waist and prevented him from jumping out in the event of an accident. However, its use was not so widespread – “the only people who regularly fastened it were racing car drivers”, recalls the History Channel site – and it also had a big flaw: in the event of a collision or sudden deceleration it actually prevented the driver could jump out, but left him vulnerable to violent blows against the windshield, and potential internal organ damage caused by the collision.
Nils Bohlin had started his career as a Swedish aviation safety engineer: his job was to design the ejection seats used by pilots in the event of a breakdown. In 1958, when he was only 28, Volvo hired him for a position that had not existed until then: head of the safety department. CEO at the time, Gunnar Engelau, was said to have become more sensitive on the issue after a relative died in a car accident.
Within a year, Bohlin found a compromise between the two-point belts and the “wraparound” belts that were used for airplane pilots, impractical for cars: the result was the so-called “three-point” belt, that is the one we still use today. “I understood that I had to fasten both the upper and lower part of the body with a single belt, and that it had to pass through the chest and hips”, recalled Bohlin some time later: “the belt needed to be fastened at the side of the hips, so as to effectively hold the body still in the event of a collision. It was just a matter of finding a solution that was simple, effective and that could be fixed with one hand. “
Volvo immediately installed Bohlin's solution on their cars, and then made its patent available to all other car manufacturers. As early as 1966, the American Congress passed a law that obliged all American manufacturers to install them on cars starting in 1968.
The first country to make the use of seat belts compulsory was Australia in 1972. The following year, France followed. Italy arrived a little later, when Bohlin had already retired (he retired in 1985): the obligation was imposed by law 111 of 13 April 1988, entered in the Official Gazette two days before the government of Giovanni Goria, supported by the so-called Pentapartite. The law went into effect on April 26 of the same year and left another year for owners of old cars to install the “new” seat belts. From 27 April 1989 the obligation had no more exceptions.
However, the obligation only applied to the front seats. The law was amended in 2006 according to European directives, and since then it has required all people in the car to fasten their seat belts.
