Despite being born and raised in Detroit, I am not what you’d call a “car person.” Give me a safe, fuel efficient car that holds all my crap and doesn’t break down every few months and I’m happy.

So when my pal Jeanne passed along an invite to a Ford parenting blogger event they were having to promote an new safety innovation, I was intrigued but not expecting to be very interested. Well, I was. The innovation — inflatable seat belts for the rear seats — was actually pretty cool, despite this dude’s funny take on it (in-car pinata!). They look and perform just like regular seat belts, except they are a lot softer and sort of padded (to incorporate the air bag). They have a heavy, odd looking buckle, which locks into place like a regular seat belt. In the event of a crash, a canister of cold gas shoots through the buckle and inflates the air bag inside the belt withing 6 milliseconds, cushioning the backseat passenger and distributing crash forces more evenly across their bodies.

Since I was there as a parenting blogger, I was hanging with several other mothers (there was a dad blogger there but he didn’t speak to the rest of us) and while all the automotive journalist guys were asking questions about the supplier (undisclosed) and how soon it will get rolled out (2011 Explorer, as an option at extra cost, then they say it will become standard and across more vehicles), the mothers had one concern: How is this going to work with a car seat?

The Ford safety engineer we talked to said that they recommend that people use the LATCH system, which alll new cars have now, so the belt’s compatibility with carseats won’t be an issue. However, they say they’ve tested it extensively and that the new belts will be safe with carseats.Boosters will work perfectly with it.

Oh yes, FTC folks: I got breakfast, lunch, a tote bag and a nice water bottle. And a hat, which I gave to my dad. And I drive a Ford car but that was true well before this event.

We also got a tour of the Safety Innovation Lab, where we saw all the various kinds of crash testing that Ford does. Pretty cool. As much as car design can seem kind of random, all kind of things — seat backs, dashboards, door pillars — are designed to keep occupants safe in a crash.

I’m hoping Ford rolls this out on non-SUV cars soon, maybe in time for our next car purchase. And it’s pretty nice to see how safe cars really are.

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