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.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.
Most passenger cars don’t really have bucket seats. Bucket seats like in race cars have hard, structural buckets, 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.
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.
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
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.
I think it’s for safety. A bucket seat is less mass under your ass in a crash.
TIL
Thank you modern engineering
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
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.
So kind of like the backseat of most modern vehicles?
Ever look at the back seat of a modern vehicle? It’s almost never a flat bench. There’s indentations, they’re just less deep than the front seat.
Yea, I own several. And they are not indented.
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.
Cute girls > Safety
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.
This is a fundamental law of nature I believe.
I have never met a country boy who’s first concern was safety.
Which is the answer to much of “why modern cars are the way they are.”
There’s a bit of a survivor bias for old stuff.
I’d love to own a Chevy suburban from the old days. I’d just drive it slow lol
Safety goes out the window when you realize that hiway blowjobs are a thing.
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.
cake felt so single strongly about it that they wrote a song
Came here to say the same.
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.
too old for me
Dude did you have sex with your teacher?
That is literally the only way for that to happen. Yes.
Summer job coworker
Ah that makes a lot of sense, actually.
“She is just giving me a ride to/from work" was often the excuse if people saw ust together but honestly no one cared. The fact she WASN’T a teacher made it no big deal.
I mean, if it’s consensual and there’s no power imbalance it’s nobody’s business
That is the big issue, and I get it. I never felt weird, age wasn’t an issue. But I can also see where others could be taken advantage of.
We ended up dating for 2 years and things ended due to life logistics. Was oddly the least crazy person I ever dated and we ended up friends after. Still bump into each other once in a while when I go back home to visit family.
In college our basement had the bench seat from a passenger van in it. Easily our best piece of furniture.
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.
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
safe for whom? Getting smashed by one of these at 30kmph is still gonna do a lot of damage
For everyone. 5% pedestrian fatality at 32km/h vs 85% at 64km/h.
And in yeehaw units, that’s… 20 vs 40mph
Sounds like a win/win.
forgive me, but i have to ask. how does speed affect the type of seat that is used?
Because as with most car designs back in the day safety was a secondary consideration (if at all) to style. Firstly because these types of seats provide absolutely no stability so everyone goes sliding all over the place the moment anyone goes around the corner at speed, and secondly because there are no actual independent seats it encourages everyone to bunch up, even if there’s only actually enough seat belts for two people.
These problems are mitigated if you slow down although they’re still there.
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.
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.
I never knew what I was missing until I got an f150. Good lord the bench seat is so comfortable and convenient.
An old bench seat f150 was what I learned to drive on as a teen. I miss it.
Me too! Mine was a five speed with an in-line six cylinder, formally owned by a pipe smoker so it had a very distinct smell.
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
it’s a euphemism from Detroit MI. There was an island in the Detroit River that had a public park on it that was infrequently patrolled by police because it was too far for them to be arsed to bother, called Grosse Isle. There were several scenic overlooks one could look out over the water or have a picnic at and since they were generally secluded, there were no gates to close it off at night, teenagers would take their dates there to make out back between the 1940’s and 1960’s. (souce, my dad, who grew up in the downriver area) When they were caught, this became a popular “excuse/explanation” to give to the poe-poe/parents.
What I never understood was how making out in the middle of nowhere was a crime.
EXTRAMARITAL KISSING WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
Moral turpitude will not be tolerated.
Haha that’s awesome. Thanks for the bit of local lore!
Sounds honestly like it’d be a bit of a spooky spot secluded in the middle of the night. Frisky teens do be pretty crazy brave. <_<
That and killing people
Boooo, nerd.
How do bench seats kill people?
They’re much more unsafe than bucket seats. Someone up above in the thread details it more.
They are common (if not standard) in 2nd and 3rd row seating.
I get a difference in frontal impacts, but a number of people have specifically cited side impacts.
Where do you live? I haven’t seen a bench seat in the back of any new passenger vehicle for decades.
So they have bucket / captain seats in the back?
yeah? They’re not as aggressive as front seats, but they’re still bucket.
Compared to actual bench seats, the difference is massive.
Interesting, because in vehicles that offer (e.g. 2nd row) captains and these, manufacturers consistently refer to this option as “bench”. And I think they would pass as “bench” for most people, and most of the things that they would want out of it, even if they aren’t the same as the older style.
Irrespective of nomenclature, these type of seats should be OK in the front row then, yes? Yet I can’t think of any new vehicles that have them.
Interesting how they’re unacceptable for cars but the norm for trains and they don’t even have seatbelts
Trains don’t take 90° turns, nor have other trains hit them at 90° angles.
Over an 8 year period there were 49 90 degree rail accidents with trucks at crossings in Australia
… with trucks… that weigh hundreds of HUNDREDS of thousands of pounds less than a train (literally just the locomotive weighs 400 THOUSAND pounds/200 short tons, even a land train in australia has a maximum weight of 164 short tons). It’s like saying “why don’t bicycles have seatbelts when cars are required to”. The car seatbelts are for collisions with other things at speed. A bike/car collision at 90 degrees is much more worrisome for the bike than the car.
There are 25 rail passenger casualties for every 100 collisions with a heavy vehicle at a crossing, of which there are 14609 collisions with trucks in the US database over a ten year period to 2021
They often didn’t have head rests, so whiplash. They also came from a time when shoulder belts weren’t common and seat belts in general were more of a suggestion.
And then there were the days when parents would stuff too many kids into the front of a single cab with a bench seat and put us 2 to a seat belt, and / or one kid on the lap of the driver. But those were also the days of the rear facing seat in the station wagon. I also remember my scout leader packing a group of us into the bed of a pickup, shit was scary but so much fun.
Stickshifts and safetybelts, bucketseats have all got to go, when we’re driving in my car, they make my baby feel so far
…and now I have that song stuck in my head.
What song is it?
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?
Because they both died in a fender bender.
Bench seats had seat belts in the middle.
bench seat injuries were often from people whipping their skulls and limbs into the ones next to them, even when seatbelted.
seat belts alone are not as safe considering the side bags and front bags you get with a bucket seat
“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.
In 1971 there were 1.4x the road deaths as in 2025 despite having the country only having 60% of the 2025 population. I wouldn’t say you have zero control over whether or not you get into an accident but very surprising things can happen suddenly and give you very little time to react. In that situation I’d want to focus on safely maneuvering the car and not be distracted with panic buckling with my life on the line.
You’re proving my point. You’re worried about something that’s just not going to happen to you. I can safely make a $500 bet with 4,000 people in the US that if they don’t wear their seat belt that they will be alive a year from now and be $1,999,500 richer. It’s not psychologically healthy to constantly worry about this, strapped into a bucket seat by a 3 point safety harness, like you’re an astronaut riding an SLS rocket to the Moon when you’re only driving down the road to buy a gallon of milk.
And what I mean by saying that people shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to, does not mean go fumbling for your seat belt in the middle of an emergency situation. It means when you know you are about to be in a dangerous situation that requires one, like riding with someone who you know is a horrible driver. Or that famous scene in Bullitt where Bullitt and the villains buckle up before their big car chase, jumping the hills of San Francisco. Today we buckle up like we’re about to get into a wild car chase when we’re just going around the corner to McDonald’s. That’s making everyone neurotic.
I’m not stroking out in fear wearing a seatbelt? It’s a regular thing I do every time with zero downside.
On the days I got hit I can definitely say I didn’t wake up planning to be hit, I drive like a grandma but just because you’re stopped at a light doesn’t mean the person behind you will care.
Not a fan of bench seats, but I can’t argue here - this is pretty solid logic. And a solid bassline in that Cake song about them too.
Had a Chevy S10 when i was in high school, my girlfriend loved it lol
my first vehicle was an '84 s10 and i miss it every day
