Originally published at: 1950s car armrests FTW | Boing Boing
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Is the armrest safe?
It’s a 1950s car accessory, so…
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Of course it’s safe. It’s right in the description.
“The metal bar is covered with fabric to prevent damage to the car upholstery.”
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With electric vehicles — bench seats can come back … two rows - three seats each - with a hatchback trunk — mini SUV style
the dashboard can be the holder of all your “crap” you put in the center console… including your drink holders and phone chargers.
Really feel car companies are so cheap in their designs — example: intermittent wipers … a rheostat is all it is … but manufacturers didn’t provide it for decades
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What does electrification have to do with it one way or the other? I always figured that the demise of bench seats was a combination of safety requirements for headrests and shoulder belts (especially for the center position) plus the inconvenience of trying to adjust the seat position and recline angle for passengers with different preferences. If you’ve got a short driver and long-legged passenger riding shotgun then bench seats really suck.
Then again, maybe still worth it because they’re far superior when you’re parking with a sweetheart on a date…
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Gosh - yes I forgot about the safety layer with a three point buckle and headrest — duh. Completely agree with you.
My thoughts on electrification is the engine compartment is smaller and simpler. — thus room to change dashboards and other layouts. Like why do we need a gear shift in the center console?
And yes — owned an early 1970s Galaxy 500 — that bench seat was bigger than my first couch!
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On the other hand, it was designed to be used in a 1950s car, so it might be the safest component in the cabin.
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I still have my first car- a 1960 Ford Falcon with an automatic transmission and column shifter. I added shoulder belts to the driver and shotgun positions. The center of the bench seat has plenty of leg room and the dashboard isn’t in the way, but with no shoulder belt a passenger riding in the middle could have a very unfortunate encounter with the steel dashboard in a collision. On the rare days that I still take it out for a drive I don’t let my kids ride up there. Worked out great when I took the family to see Cars 3 at a drive-in theater though.
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My dad was 6’ and my mom 4’11", so we never had bench seats, even in the '60s.
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Here’s a feature I’d love to see on our vanpool ride:
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… they could just build shelves up against the windshield — it’s not like we need to see through it
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Nah, they’d rather put a fricken tablet there and add Yet Another Driver distraction to the car that’s expensive to replace and removes more functionality than it adds.
(I have a rant about my ‘dream’ vehicle if anyone wants to hear it.)
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perfect! — totally forgot about this song 
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My earliest bench seat memories are of my mom holding her arm across us tiny children sitting in the middle of the front seat when coming to an abrupt stop, so that we wouldn’t get dashboard shaped dents in our noggins. This contraption would have interfered with her safety activities.
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And only after stealing the design from the patent holder.
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That’s not quite true. It’s a timer circuit, not a rheostat. It wasn’t easy to make such a thing for a car before the advent of reliable transistors in the 1960s. Heck, car windshield wipers weren’t even electrified until the late fifties, they used engine vacuum instead.
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My mother recalled to me a child car seat that attached in similar fashion
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oh, yeah. i remember that.
had one when i was little (early 60s) and it was car seat, but also had a little table that you could attach the seat to and iy became a high chair. as baby grows, it becomes the “kiddie table” for their first sit-down eats. Dear Brother came along and that little death trap became his, too.
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No transmission tunnel/straight-through flat floors remove one impediment to bench seats that are actually usable.
On the other hand, I’ve no idea what modern design and usage regulations have to say about it.
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