Cars In The Future : Child Car Seats
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Child car seats are a large concern for the section of the road safety community who work in ETP, although a child seat itself is essentially an engineering measure designed to decrease the risk of injury to children in vehicles. This is an area that is a very good example in which ETP and Engineering have worked together – the engineering measure provides a potential improvement in safety and ETP ensures that the correct use and usage rates are improved.
There is clear concern from the public and from experts that inappropriate restraint use and misfitted restraints would lead to a preventable injury, which is why we have seen this integrated approach.
It is important that this work continues in the future, although the mandatory use of child restraints is now legislated, there is still a need to ensure that parents purchase a seat suitable for the vehicle and know how to fit it correctly. RoSPA remains concerned that the vast number of child restraints in use are incorrectly fitted.
Currently, there is a European standard for child car seats, which approves child seats for use in forward and rearward facing vehicle seats. The standard is ECE R44, and the current revisions are ECE R44.03 and ECE R44.04. It is illegal to sell child restraints that do not meet this standard, and from March 2008, it will be illegal to use child car seats that do not also meet this standard.
The standard covers many areas but generally relates to the crashworthiness of the seat and the testing methodology. Other issues are also covered, such as the quality of the instructions that the seat is supplied with.
ECE R44 goes some way to controlling aspects of usability between different seats – for example by standardising things such as the harness release button. The standard does not cover the ease of a seats use.
EuroNCAP also release star ratings for in car child safety. These ratings are a measure of the combined performance of both the vehicle and the restraint recommended by the car manufacturers. A good star rating in this could be neither used to prove that every child restraint is safe in the back of that vehicle, nor that the child restraint is safe in every vehicle.
What the EuroNCAP ratings do achieve is they put emphasis on the vehicle manufacturer to design cars that can provide child safety in the rear. How best to design the vehicle to offer protection in the tests can then be considered in the design phase.
Research has shown that booster seats with side wings can reduce the risk of injury to children in a side impact, as they help to contain the head and prevent it from hitting an intruding vehicle of the interior of the car.
None of the standards systematically cover is the protection that a child seat offers in side impact, although occasional consumer testing has rightly raised the issue. It is important that child seats are designed to protect children in real world crashes, which can result in serious or fatal injury.
RoSPA are frequently contacted by parents who wish to find out which child seats offer the most protection for their children in a crash. The main point is that the safest seat is one which is fitted to the manufacturers instructions, meaning that it will be safe and secure in the vehicle – with very little or no movement forward and side to side – and will also be designed for the child’s weight and height. This is the most important point.
However, parents may have many options available to them or need guidance about which child seats they should try to fit into their car first, the assumption that expense equals safety is not one which should be made.
There are many different consumer ratings systems available for parents to refer too. Many consumer groups carry out tests that have been good for giving guidance and raising specific issues to parents, for example, tests by Which? have previously highlighted the dangers of carrycots for younger children. However, the assessment methods used differ, and this can lead to the same restraint having different ratings in different programmes.
A comprehensive European wide testing regime similar to EuroNCAP, which consists of a scientific based procedure whereby seats were rated for usability and dynamic performance to give a rating would be highly beneficial for consumers and encourage people towards buying safer seats.
There are several issues which need to be examined in future to improve the safety of children in cars.
More attention needs to be paid to the potential dangers of interaction between child car seats and side airbags. Laboratory tests have shown that there may be cause for concern, although this has never been backed up by real world data.
Systems such as ISOFix will almost certainly lead to a reduction in the number of misfitted child seats, as their method of attachment is much more intuitive. The fact that all new vehicles now have ISOFix points will increase the number of ISOFix seats being used.
Work needs to be done towards standardising the ISOFix system, as it is still the case that not every ISOFix seat will work in different cars.
There are also two main ways of preventing rotation around the point where the seat clips in – either by a top tether or foot at the base of the seat – and it is important that parents know how to use both of these devices and which one is needed for the seat that they are using.
It is also important that vehicle manufacturers themselves start to think about how to offer more protection to children in a ‘family’ car. Although it is accepted that it may be virtually impossible to provide a suitable integrated restraint for children under 3, due to the large anthropometrical and physiological differences between small children and adults, there is much more which can be achieved.
There are now one or two models of vehicle available that combine integrated booster systems into the back seats of the car.
It is important that any system in a vehicle that is intended for children is tested to and has passed the appropriate UN ECE standard to ensure that it can offer a known and appropriately safe level of protection.
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RoSPA is a registered charity: Registered Charity No: 207823 Patron: Her Majesty the Queen RoSPA Head Office: Edgbaston Park, 353 Bristol Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B5 7ST, UK |
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