Trapped By My Seatbelt

[Spazdog]

Arrived at my destination, pushed the little red button and.....nothing. No click, no release, no retractor rolling the belt back up...just stuck.

Push again, still stuck. Thank goodness I'm not in a fiery crash.

So I unwind the seatbelt and crawl out of it. Once free I push the button a few more times. It eventually unlocks but then it wouldn't buckle back.

I had to buckle the seatbelt into the passenger seat catch and listen to the seatbelt reminder beep at me every 30 seconds to the Mazda dealership and then back home.

Got my new catch the next day. Closer inspection revealed a familiar stamp on a failed part:

Ahhhh, the FoNoGo stamp. All my cars failed parts have been emblazoned with the Ford logo or FOMOCO stamp.

I was going to send a letter to Mazda about the failed safety part and a request for a refund, but I'm considering sending it to Ford instead. With 8X10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back describing each one...

 

[Colt45ws]

You can disable that seatbelt reminder. 2nd or 3rd thing I did to my car was disable that garbage. The other was the 'honk on remote lock'.

 

[eljefino]

Kind of looks like a flatworm:

 

[Rick in PA]

 

[01rangerxl]

Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
You can disable that seatbelt reminder. 2nd or 3rd thing I did to my car was disable that garbage. The other was the 'honk on remote lock'.


On my Rangers, Belt Minder is temporarily disabled by pushing down on the release button. It turns it off until the next time the truck is started. There's a way to actually turn it off completely too, but I can't remember the procedure.

 

[Spazdog]

Originally Posted By: eljefino
Kind of looks like a flatworm:

Awesome.
In the event of a collision I may actually be saved by a liver fluke.

 

[mechanicx]

Well at least you don't have a Fusion then you'd have even more things Ford messed up

.

 

[01rangerxl]

With regards to Ford and seatbelts, for some reason they do find them challenging. The one manufacturing defect I have discovered on my truck is the backwards driver's side seatbelt buckle. For the first two years of the truck's life, I didn't drive it much and my parents never noticed or cared about the backwards buckle. One day when I was 16 I was driving the truck when I noticed I couldn't get the seatbelt to buckle without having a twist in it. I looked over on the passenger side, and sure enough the buckle was installed with the metal part inboard, vs outboard on the driver's side. How Ford managed to do this is beyond me. The truck was under warranty when it was discovered, but we decided not to pursue it since we didn't want the dealer taking apart interior panels and possibly creating rattles. The belt only twists near the b-pillar mount, so it lays flat across you and doesn't seem to be a decapitation risk.

 

[rjundi]

No warranty? My Honda had a lifetime warranty on seatbelts.

 

[artificialist]

This is why I always have a "Life-Hammer" which has a titanium coated blade that cuts through a seatbelt easily.

 

[bdcardinal]

Originally Posted By: rjundi
No warranty? My Honda had a lifetime warranty on seatbelts.


That is a Honda thing. Ford and Mazda cover them under the NVLW unless there is a special service program.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Originally Posted By: eljefino
Kind of looks like a flatworm:

If you cut it in half, will the bottom half grow a new head and the top half a new bottom?

 

[Spazdog]

Originally Posted By: artificialist
This is why I always have a "Life-Hammer" which has a titanium coated blade that cuts through a seatbelt easily.


The cloth part was fine. I had no desire to cut that.

I not even really blaming FoMoCo. I bought the car used. For all I know the previous owner poured an entire Dunkin'Donuts coffee Coolata into the buckle and it took over 5 years for it to finally ruin the mechanism. Or maybe my kid forced something in there at some point while it was not buckled. (a former co-worker had a beautiful Mercedes Benz 300SD and you could not use any of the seatbelts because his daughter had dropped pennies into every one of the buckles)

It's just something funny that happened to me and coincidence that all my failed parts are stamped "Ford"

 

[Spazdog]

Misfire cylinder 2.

Another bad Ford Coil on Plug!

More FoNoGo. If it wasn't such a pain it would be funny that every single failed part on my car is emblazoned with FORD.

That's 5 out of 6! I was going to do the last 2 at the same time but the part store only had 1 in stock. I switched cylinder 1's coil pack with cylinder 4 so I don't have to take the upper plenum off.

 

[ffhdriver]

In years gone by, i"ve had seat belts on GM and Ford cars get twisted when retracting so the buckle was on the wrong side. Unless you were very, very mentally challenged you could fix it youself.

 

[Spazdog]

It was nice of Ford to label all the parts that will fail on my Mazda with FoMoCo