Where the body meets the car

I am fearful that in the quest to control our driving habits, some car czar in the upper echelons of the motor vehicle industry, lately the federal government, will be trying to annihilate every semblance of comfort in a car on the grounds that if you get too comfortable in those things, you will become impaired enough to run over a lizard or a rabbit or something.

Now I know that when it comes to vehicle performance, roughly half of you are more concerned with where the rubber meets the road. But if cars become smaller and more Spartan, surely they will become less comfortable in that area where the body meets the car—the car seat.

Speaking of car seats, look at what they have done to our under-60-lbs. population where their little backsides meet the car. Child car-seat engineers ought to be required to drive for at least three hours straight with a couple of rear-facing, strapped-in kids who will be screaming because they are rear-facing and strapped-in.

I’m sorry, but those conditions don’t enhance safety much since two screaming kids are more of a distraction to the driver than a diaper bag full of cell phones all receiving text messages at once. Besides who doesn’t drive more carefully when his payload isn’t strapped down?

In addition to the distraction issue. there is the bodily injury issue. I’m not talking about the collision-induced kind. Did you ever try to put a pacifier into a baby’s back-seat rear-facing mouth from the front-seat forward-facing driver’s seat? An Olympic gymnast couldn’t do it. After a couple of shoulder dislocations, you will soon learn that you need to pull over for that one. By the way, speaking of Olympic athletes, do you know how fast and how far an eleven-month-old can throw a pacifier? Try moving quickly enough to catch one when you are buckled up.

But I digress. Back to the issue of driver/passenger comfort. I will have to admit that I haven’t test-driven a whole lot of cars. A few Fords, a few Chevys, middle-of-the-road types of vehicles. But I think they are getting more uncomfortable lately. There are more leather seats around, at least within my frame of reference.
Are leather seats practical? Not from the cow’s point of view.
Are leather seats really leather? If they are, I can’t imagine why PETA isn’t all over that one.

Are leather seats comfortable? No, and I don’t know what kinds of positives they are supposed to deliver either. They are cold in winter and hot in summer. During all seasons they are slippery and you tend to slide forward in them until you are in danger of taking a seat on the floor. Everything you set on them—your purse, your mail, your groceries reacts the same way.

I’m sorry, I’m not buckling in my accessories. It is bad enough to be told by an unforgiving beeper that I have to buckle myself in. Not that I wouldn’t want a seat belt in place if I ever needed one, but I just want to be the one to decide to place it.

Then there is the headrest which is a misnomer and should be called a pain in the neck. Whether it is really designed to be a whiplash preventer but was then given the misleading name of headrest to prevent our emotional unrest, I am not sure, but don’t plan on resting your head on that thing. I question its ability to prevent whiplash since whiplash could easily occur somewhere in the huge gulf between the head and the “headrest.”

Okay, just so you don’t think that all I do is complain, here is a great big thumbs-up, high-five, A-okay, whatever is good, to the inventor of the seat heater, alternately called the heat seater. Somebody got that one right. It is actually warm in winter. It warms almost half your body while it gently relaxes your shoulders which were probably previously hunched against the cold or dislocated from reaching the baby or strained from trying to lay your head back onto the whiplash preventer.