At the time, the Secretary of Transportation was Elizabeth Dole. Serving under Ronald Reagan, she didn’t want to be on the hook for ordering the car industry to do something it was lobbying against. So she ordered that unless more than half the states made seat belt use mandatory, she would order passive restraints installed in all new cars. The car companies didn’t want to pass on the considerable expense of passive restraints, and saw that altering their position to seat belt laws was a smaller shift to the system they were part of. After Dole’s ruling, it only took five years for more than
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