Clear Head Restraints: The Next Big Thing

I’m going to write an article soon about my sweet new ride; the hot little budget car I now drive after trading in the “urban assault vehicle” designed for four kids, their friends, their gear, two dogs and 170 inches of snow every year.

But this article is about the need for a change in head restraints.  The first change occured when I brought my new car back to the dealer because the head rest propelled me so far forward that my shoulders could not rest at the top of the seat and the back of my head was getting sanded down by painful restraint.  The last car I drove had articulated head rests which allowed me to adjust the forward pitch.  This little thing only allows you to move the headrest up and down which does nothing to solve the problem of a severe angle.

When I went to the dealer I requested that if they could not find adjustable head rests, please just remove these and I’ll take my chances with whiplash in a rear-end collision.  Honestly, with the head rests in place, if I got hit from behind, my little neck would quickly snap to fill the huge gap between where my back left the seat and my head hit the restraint.  In other words, I faced a greater risk of injury with these head restraints in than out.

The service technicians offered to put the restraints in backward, which is much improved because they are not pushing my head out, but they don’t allow it to flop back either.  The configuration looks a little, well, backward, but if it works better, why not?

Which brings me to the topic of the Next Big Thing.  How much time have you spent riding in the back seat of a car lately?  Probably not much I assume, but if you climb in and ride for awhile, you’ll see why my idea should fly.

We need see-through head restraints.  In the old days, if you sat in the back seat, there was only a low, sofa-like seat back with two heads standing between you and the magnificent view of the road.  Now though, you might as well be traveling in an MRI, and this comes from one who falls asleep in those machines and is not claustrophobic in any way.  I tested the leg room in the back of my new car and I kept shifting my head to the left and to the right, trying to get past that enormous view-killing head restraint, which now about the size of a small dog.

Why not design them, aesthetically speaking, as if they are not even there?  Bring back that much of the old days where all you see is the top of the seat and two heads in front?  At least you could see enough of the view out the windshield to believe you are actually part of the ride.

The “fabric” could be clear poly-something-or-other, and the filler could be something that looks like those clear pebbles into which you stick flowers.  You know what they say, “if they can send a man to the moon….”

So Detroit, or Tokyo or Stuttgart, how ’bout it?  Head restraints, like seat belts, air bags and fat steering wheels, are here to stay, so why not make it all more comfortable in every way?  If not, we can just place goggles on back seat passengers, like the goggles that show movies on claustrophobic MRI patients.  We can offer up views of the Pacific Coast Highway in California or scenic route 1 in New England:  Anything to take one’s mind off the cocoon of synthetic car material that presently surrounds back seat riders today as if in some “new car” smelling cocoon.

Tagged as: auto design, car design, head restraints, new invention