Buckle up. Yeah, you. With the harness.

There's this pesky rule over at NHTSA that motor vehicles have to have safety belts that are interlocked to a warning system that tells you if they're not securely fastened while the car is running. I recently discovered while riding around in my girlfriend's new New Beetle that this function is also tied into the passenger airbag sensor in newer cars. Adding to the legal fun is your local police precinct, which will gladly cut you loose from a few greenbacks if you're caught motoring without restraint.

So where does this leave the weekend racer who drives his or her barely street-legal asphalt-eater during the week? Likely in a bind. The factory three-point belts are long-gone due to their complete lack of utility at more than 0.02g and proper five-point harnesses have been installed in their places. Multi-point harnesses rarely meet standard DOT or NHTSA safety requirements because they cannot be interlocked properly (or easily) to the vehicle's warning systems. The center cam locks that actually secure the harnesses are free of the traditional hard mounting points that enable sensor wiring to be deployed.

Word got to VPB recently that Ford and Roush are working on a new way of getting safety gear to communicate with the standard on-board systems that allow the interlocks to function. The communications issue seems to have something to do with data streams from independent systems. While I don't have much more info than that, I'm guessing that they are up to something that afficionados of factory-built racers will flock to: factory multi-point harnesses with full NHTSA- and DOT-legal interlock functionality.