That's why I really like cars which make a sound if you don't have your seatbelt on. That way they don't give you the choice of not wearing the seatbelt and it's how it should be. This is why in such cases I strongly believe governments should force companies to enable something like that.
The social norms are stupid and this would give you the excuse to ignore them without giving it a second thought (hey, the car is making me wear it!).
I like that feature, but I hate how the alarm goes off as soon as the car turns on. That just annoys me, and is the wrong time to give the warning, since you'd have to put the seatbelt on before turning on the engine, which it's much faster to do the latter first.
They should hold off on the warning until you've shifted the car out of park.
Every car I've had doesn't alarm until it's shifted out of park (it has a light always when on, it starts blinking when you shift out of park, and then beeps after ~30s in gear, or in one case after you go over 5MPH (I had to look up that one in the manual)).
A long time ago there were cars with the shoulder belt attached to a motorized track on the door frame that would pretty much force you to wear it...only for the front seats though.
Maybe instead of a power button, cars should turn on when you buckle up after the brake pedal is depressed.
They tried that with a few models and no they shouldn't. It was an actual pain and prone to failure. I had to rewire my friend's car (an all the time seat belt wearer) because of how crappy those things hold up.
People will wear them or not. Making things more complex just means it will fail and make people do strange things.
It should when it was tried and is just not a working concept. It basically comes in the same category as "bike handle bar warmers". Making an annoying ding is going to get most people to put on their belt. Making the car not move is one more thing that can go wrong in daily life and can make an emergency worse.
Well to me this seems like a passive solution that would convert most people who right now aren't using seatbelts to use them. Now, if some are trying to actively be stupid about it - I guess nothing in the world can prevent that.
The best the designers of products can do is "make them as safe as possible by default". There will always be people who actively work against those safety mechanisms though (like people turning off their ESP for that extra "sports-like" performance for their car - in urban traffic).
Good. Now, we have an active act of non-compliance with an (hopefully? please?) existing law that forces you to buckle up. Let's start the fines with 1k and see if this helps, if not, go up. Not buckling up is so insane, I cannot even begin to imagine it ..
Given that person is only harming themselves, it's totalitarian to apply a fine here.
If someone makes such a deliberate and conscious decision not to wear a seatbelt, maybe you could assume they have their own reason for that.
It's not even clear that forcing people to wear a seatbelt saves lives. It may increase the risk to other people, if people are seeking out a level of risk that they're comfortable with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Risk_compensation
They're not; they risk harming other people in the vehicle and there is extra effort to recover the injured body of someone from an RTA if that person wasn't wearing a seatbelt which puts emergency services at increased risk of harm.
I'll repeat my point in your terms: By forcing people to wear the seatbelt, other risk-taking behaviour is increased, which appears to result in more RTAs.
The evidence on either side is not enough to justify bankrupting fines.
I visited Fort Lauderdale, FL earlier this year and it seemed like all the taxis were Priuses which of course all have a very loud you must buckle your seat belt noise.
I certainly don't understand why the taxi allows you not to, but in your own car you should be in charge.
I don't really give a hoot about the counter arguments against it, but at the same time I wouldn't let anybody in a car I drive without the seatbelt on.
The social norms are stupid and this would give you the excuse to ignore them without giving it a second thought (hey, the car is making me wear it!).