03/13/2026
Part 2–So in Part 1 I talked about getting a seatbelt extender for my Mazda and made a big point of telling you to order directly from your manufacturer because using the wrong one is genuinely unsafe, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration literally recommends going straight to the manufacturer for this, so I called Mazda and the first person I spoke with had absolutely no idea what I was talking about and was pretty confused by the whole thing.
But here’s where it actually gets good because he called me back within five minutes, fully informed, and told me they could order either a 9 inch or 12 inch extender directly from the manufacturer, I picked it up the very next day, and the whole process ended up being way smoother than I expected once we got to the right person.
The kid was very nice about the whole thing and said he learned something new
This is still worth showing though because it perfectly illustrates the problem with size-inclusive safety equipment, the official recommendation exists, the product exists, but the infrastructure to access it is inconsistent and the people staffing customer service lines aren’t always trained on it, which means people in larger bodies are expected to figure all of this out on their own on top of already navigating a safety system that wasn’t designed to fit them in the first place.
If you’ve ever been told to just contact the manufacturer about something related to your body size and hit a wall, you know exactly how this feels, and the fact that it worked out doesn’t mean the barrier wasn’t real. If you want to see how it actually fit, go check out Part 1.