Rear Seat Belt Buckle Problems of Honda Pilot

Traveling on a desolate highway, I heard my son whimper in the back seat. To my horror, I saw that he had tangled the seatbelt around his neck and was being lifted from his seat by it. My husband pulled off the road and we lunged back to release the belt. We then realized that he was not trapped by his own seatbelt but by the seatbelt designed for a center passenger in the second row. This belt comes down from the ceiling and connects at the seat to a latch designed without a quick release button. The latched belt had been resting against the seat behind my son's right shoulder. Playing with that belt, he had pulled it far enough to activate the retraction feature. Then he wrapped it around his head. When it began to tighten, he panicked, and it slipped down around his neck and tightened more. My husband and I grabbed the belt where it came out of the ceiling to stop it from retracting, but it was already too tight to get over his head. We were struggling to think straight. Neither of us knew how to detach the belt and we were trying to find something to cut it. Realizing the danger he was in, my son started squirming more. In calming him, we calmed ourselves a little. Thankfully, I remembered a friend mentioning he had found in the owner's manual how to detach the belt from the latch by sticking a key in a notch on the latch. I grabbed the keys from the ignition and popped the latch. My son was safe. Had only one parent been in the car, he would not have been able to hold the belt to keep it from retracting and reach the keys in the ignition - let alone find the very brief mention of this belt's operation in the user's manual. A driver could be unaware of this happening right behind him. My son nearly died with us helplessly standing by. . Read more...

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