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Bondage and Discipline



So this babe in a black-leather teddy picks up a riding crop and says to
me, "--

Whoops, wrong list.

Ahem.  Seriously, this has to do with a subject already broached in
other mail, namely the Family Car.  Oh, and in keeping with the
international flavor of this list, I'm inquiring exclusively about
U.S.-market Audis.

For most of the last ten years, I've been restoring and driving an
eclectic selection of interesting cars from the Sixties, supplemented by
the occasional disposable daily-driver from the Eighties.  

All the cars I've ever owned either had factory seatbelts in them, or I
installed three-point harnesses shortly after I took them home.  And the
newest vehicle I've ever owned was built in 1986.  One result of this is
that my family is really anal-retentive about seatbelt use; if I so much
as turn the key in the ignition before everyone's strapped in, I get a
chorus of "DA-aaaad!  We're not in our SEAT belts yet!" from the back
seat.  (Which is the real reason for the subject line -- we're very
disciplined about our bondage... I repeat, ahem.)

This also, however, means I'm ignorant of the timeline for passive
restraints in U.S.-market Audis (or any other car, for that matter). 
I'm sort of dimly aware of the following:

1 - Some time in the late Eighties or early Nineties, U.S. lawmakers
required cars to be sold with passive restraint systems.

2 - Early passive restraint systems tended toward the "motorized mouse"
variety of automatic seatbelt.

3 - Air bag technology eventually reached a point at which cars began
adding air bags to front seat positions.

But... I have no idea about the years in which this happened, or (in
particular) about the years and models of Audi that may be affected by
this legislation.  Since we're about to go shopping for a
late-Eighties/early-Nineties Audi wagon... I now have reason to find
out.

And yes, I *know* I can simply look at the car we go test-drive, but I
would like to have some idea in advance so that as I'm looking through
the classified ads, I can sound knowledgeable by telling my wife in
advance whether a particular car is likely to have belts or bags.

(BTW: Whatever your opinion is on air bags -- you're absolutely right! 
You're 100% correct!  So you don't have to post anything to the list to
contradict me and start a huge flame war on the subject, thereby ticking
off hundreds if not thousands of Audi enthusiasts world-wide, because *I
already agree with you*! :-)

--Scott Fisher