NHTSA in hot seat after troubling baby car seat test found - Part II
Earlier this week, we reported that the NHTSA was in the hot seat when it failed to report infant seat failures. Our post stemmed from a report in the Chicago Tribune following its investigation through thousands of buried National Highway Traffic Safety Administration test reports. The Tribune report raised more than a few eyebrows as it called into question current child seat safety standards, and accused the NHTSA of negligence in not reporting the poor results to the public.
SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., a national non-profit organization dedicated to child passenger safety, was quick to issue a response in a effort to clear up the Tribune's alarming and sensational report. According to SBS, the infant/child seat manufacturers do exhaustive testing of new designs on computers before they ever get bolted to a test sled. Those tests, run at 30 mph into a rigid barrier (as required by FMVSS 213), "...are the equivalent of hitting another car at 60 mph and more severe than more than 95% of real-world crashes." As of today, the largest collection of consistently analyzed cases of children in crashes over a ten-year period was done by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The findings indicated that "...the chance of injury of an infant properly restrained in a correctly secured rear-facing seat is less than 1%." While no restraint system (adult, child, or infant) is optimal for every crash scenario, all studies still indicate that a properly restrained infant is going to fend very well in a real-world crash. Keep 'em buckled up!
[Source: CarSeat.org]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Rick 10:17AM (3/06/2009)
How does that answer the question about the car seats in the car crash tests performing badly?!
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Michael Harley 10:42AM (3/06/2009)
According to the response on SafetyBeltSafe:
"By going to Canada, Combi representative Edward Whitaker explained, his company was able to replicate the event and results shown in the in-vehicle tests and subsequently replaced a spring in their products to change the outcome."
- Mike
Rick 10:48AM (3/06/2009)
Thanks.
From My Cube 10:47AM (3/06/2009)
its to bad we dont teach better driving...
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Shawn 10:52AM (3/06/2009)
30 mph into a rigid barrier is equivalent of hitting another car at 60 mph? Wouldn't 2 cars going 60 mph equivalent of a car hitting a wall at 120 mph? Maybe I'm wrong.
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Franz 11:13AM (3/06/2009)
They must mean hitting a stationary car. There's no way they could mean hitting another moving car head on.
LBuzzer 11:14AM (3/06/2009)
I would think that the 2nd would be stationary.
What the concern is, is the peak deceleration rate, and how quickly that value rises (neck-snapping effect).
Hitting a rigid barrier at 30 mph gives a very high peak 'g' number since the rigid barrier allows very little time to decelerate to 0 mph; whereas a car with deformable structures hitting another car with deformable structures allows for more time to decelerate to 0 mph (assuming a "perfect" head-on collision), meaning that the peak 'g' value is probably not going to exceed the peak 'g' value from running into a brick wall. We're talking tenths of a second, but it makes a huge difference.
John 12:04PM (3/06/2009)
NHTSA never "failed" to report any child seat failures. They are mandated to publish a monthly compliance status report list that would include all such failures and it's available to the public.
It's hardly NHTSA's fault the media isn't smart enough to know where to look.
Here's your hint, media types:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/testing/comply/monthly/
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Fritz 2:10PM (3/06/2009)
Hey, imagine that. Government clutter and the free market cleaning up the mess...
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Fxfoxit 6:21AM (5/13/2009)
This is kind of funny.
http://www.babycarseatsale.com/