It’s really not hard to follow. The incident on video was about a seatbelt, but throughout the whole flight the flight attendant was trying to get a different passenger in the same row to put their mask on.

Am I the only “old” around here who read car magazines back in the day? One of them did an expose on this very “feature” of the GM cars at one point. It actually was not (totally) penny-pinching for once - it was fuel economy ratings!

How badly engineered a car has to be that you can’t leave proper room to roll down the rear windows? Any cheap car from any part of the world had rolling down windows, except the cheapest of all (2cv, Fiat 500/600, Renault 4), which at least used to have hinged rear windows.

Pretty sure my ever-present claustrophobia came from riding in the back of the 80 Buick Century we used to own in my mid-teens. The little vent windows that did open helped precisely not one bit.

Oh yes I do remember. My buddy’s Mom had one of this station wagon’s with just the vent window and NO AC. One very vivid trip the NJ pine barrens for a weekend of sweaty canoeing wherein 6 of us piled into this car on a sweltery July Friday. Going down the Turnpike with the front windows barely down because his mom…

Oh so you think the back seat deserves the Landau roof AND windows that roll down?  OK Moneybags. 

I confess. I was born before then, and did experience it. The glory of the cars to about 68/69. Low-compression, high-roll land yachts in the early seventies. Then the “hell, these suckers will buy American regardless, so why modernize?” phase that followed, and basically guaranteed that I wouldn’t.

“I also remember that for some of these cars, like the Malibu, some soft-hearted body designer at GM managed to sneak in a tiny little vent window, which you could open like 3/4 of an inch and press a narrow, sweaty strip of your face into, greedily drinking in the passing air like a starving dog over a dropped pot of…

The rear windows in our 1980 Citation only went down about halfway. The reason, at least as much as I could guess as a 13-year-old kid, was the shape of the door itself. The contour of the rear wheel arch intruded on the rear edge of the door and left no room for a full-width window to go all the way down. So halfway…

How many people willingly bought these cars without roll-down windows, though?

One of MY pet peeves as well. I complain about this one as well, although I’ve never owned one of these vehicles, and for this specific reason, never will.

I had a 1980 Olds Cutlass Brougham 4-door (one of the nicer trims if memory serves) and I still remember those fixed rear windows and power rear vent wings - one of which was broken at the time we bought the car. Another thing I remember about that car was it had a joystick inside the car to adjust the driver’s side…

“So, now that summer’s coming and you may find yourself in the back seat of a (non-1980s GM A- or G-body or 1981 K-car)"

I worked in a place that had a small fleet of Malibus from this era. Truly despicable cars. We actually had a booking system based on what was broken on each car. As in: “I have to hop over to the plant, I’ll take broken passenger door. I’m going alone anyway” or “I’ll take fried headlight switch. I’ll only be out…

At least they had the decency to provide rear seat ashtrays.

Let’s remove the ventilation so that we can cram one more adult in the back seat.  Yeah, that sounds like a great idea!

I was imagining quite the opposite - a darkened room full of heavily-smoking car executives watching grainy 8mm film secretly shot on car sales lots, and one of them realising that buyers never got in the back seat, so they could de-content the car and still get the signature on the sales documentation.

The. Worst.
And I’m not forgiving the ones that managed to get the window down only halfway in the back.
Myself, and my friends and cousins, all stuck back there, spent our time awkwardly sticking our arms out those halfway windows, desperate for any relief from the heat.
This was in Mississippi and Virginia.
The. Worst.
An…

“...grew up sweating buckets into the absorbent velour of suffocating 1980s sedans.”

I’ve read that this was done to save about an inch of door card thickness. This allowed three adults to “comfortably” sit in the back seat, and losing ~2" of seat width would make this less likely.