So as the title says, I had the left rear seat belt receptacle fall apart the other week. This is the portion where the seat belt plugs into for clarification. When I say fall apart, I mean that the plastic casing around the receptacle broke off into two pieces, rendering the seat useless until I replaced it.

I'm not an engineer, but my father is a retired mechanical engineering who spent many years designing different plastic moulds. He looked at the failed part and mentioned that it's seems that the "ultrasonic welds" that fuse the two pieces of plastic together that created the case around the receptacle failed. This shouldn't happen as he explained that they use sound to heat the plastic to make it bond.... It's all over my head on the production process.

I called Honda who said that there is only the bumper to bumper warranty that covers the seat belts and I'd have to bring the car in or just order the part and install it myself. My Fit is a 2018 Sport with about 52,000 miles on it at the time this happened.

I opted to order the part and was told it would take up to three weeks to arrive as it is backordered. It cost me $113.00. It thankfully came in just a few days later, so I don't know if the parts department was just trying to piss me off on purpose or what. Install was easy, just two bolts. All is fixed and working now.

So, has this happened to anyone else? I'd really hate for one of these receptacles to fail if I was in an accident. I'm honestly a little nervous about putting my kids in my car in fear that if we do get into a wreck a seat belt can fail. As far I I can tell, there is nothing that would smash this part to the point of the casing breaking into two. I still have the part and can post a picture of it as well, it just in the garage at the moment and pouring rain, but I think for the purpose of documenting, I'll upload one tomorrow.

 

Never heard of that. Some pictures of your issue would help as that is nothing that I have ever read before here.

Plastic doesn't just fall apart.

 

You got scammed

 

100% true. I had them fix the seatbelts in my 1988 Civic at no charge. As long as the parts are in stock with Honda they are covered for a lifetime. You don't even need to be the original purchaser.

 

It should be replaced for free, as others have pointed out.

Post some pics of the failed parts. It's not unusual for the plastic covers to fail, that's not the part that locks the seat belt. The part that does that is metal.

 

I'm with petejones. I've never looked at my Fit seatbelts all that closely, but the plastic bits are usually just cosmetic and "protective" in the sense that they keep small fingers, hair, Cheerios, etc out of the metal parts that do the actual work of securing the two parts of the belt together.

 

I was relocating a child seat from my 2016 Fit with 85,000 km and had the same experience of finding a seat belt buckle that fell apart. Initially, it looked like the red button was pressed down and jammed, and the casing was already detached. The red button wouldn’t push any further when I tried. After some effort, I unlocked the seat belt and the receptacle casing separated into two pieces. What’s more, the little rod that connects the receptacle to the strap that’s bolted to the frame detached and fell off.

Like the OP, I’m pretty disappointed but also grateful that I didn’t find this out in a crash. I believe that if I had an accident, the force of the child seat tugging on the receptacle would have just yanked it loose…don’t want to imagine the consequences for my child or other occupants in the car that could be hit by a loose 50lb convertible car seat.

Here are some photos. You can see that one side of the plastic bottom had warped, likely due to the weight of the child seat tugging on it constantly. It then broke off one of the clips within.

I will contact the dealership to see if it could be covered by goodwill, since there isn’t the same lifetime warranty on seat belt components in Canada as there is the US (go figure). I will also contact Honda Canada as this is a safety hazard.

 

What ended up happening after talking to the dealership or Honda Canada? I'm Canada-based too and had a similar issue! Thank you and take care.

 

$113 - ridiculous, but not surprising. For something like that, eBay or a wrecking yard would be a good choice.

 

Superglue? 😂