Consumer Report’s Latest Carseat Findings - Don’t Panic!
I just got word that Consumer Reports has just came out with new findings indicting the safety of most infant carseats. You can read their article here. But be on alert - this information comes from a company that is refusing (and has refused in the past) to tell us their testing protocols. You can read the comments that some carseat inspectors have here.
The question is - can we trust the findings of Consumer Reports on this issue? Not yet, in my opinion. Sure, the article is very disturbing. Any time you imagine your child’s carseat detaching from its’ base and flying around the car you are going to panic. But ask yourself this: can the results of the Consumer Reports experiment be scientifically replicated? Unless they release all the details of their experiment, we have no way of knowing. There are any number of possible problems with their results. Maybe they didn’t install the carseats correctly. Maybe their methods don’t truly represent the realities of real-world crashes. Maybe their conclusion that some seats failed their tests don’t really correlate to any increased risk of death in an actual collision. There are even some concerns among carseat techs that Consumer Reports might not even use certified carseat techs when they design and perform their experiments. What the consumer report article does is alert us to a potential problem with infant carseats. My hope is that reputable organizations, like the NHTSA, will try to replicate their results in a test with disclosed protocols.
In the meantime, as a parent with young children in carseats, I’m going to try to keep these things in mind:
- No matter the result of this one experiment, my child is still safer in any age-appropriate and correctly installed carseat than she would be without one.
- The rate of fatalities in car crashes for infants in correctly installed, rear-facing carseats is very low.
- Perhaps the most important thing is to make sure that your carseats are installed correctly, every time.
- Until Consumer Reports decides to disclose their protocals, their results cannot be viewed as science. In other words, if they want to be treated like scientists and have their results taken seriously, they should act like scientists.
But some parents, upon reading the Consumer Reports article, will feel compelled to take action anyway. CR give you a number of options to take at the end of the article. One option would be replace your infant seat with one of the seats that CR says passed their tests - either the Baby Trend Flex-Loc or the Graco SnugRide with EPS. Another option would be to replace your infant seats with convertible seats, which don’t currently seem to have the same safety concerns (just make sure your child fits in a convertible seat correctly). Finally, I’m going to wait and hope that Consumer Reports opens up their experiment to the experts so we can all honestly see what is going on.
Here’s the article.
http://www.consumerreports.org.....ats_ov.htm
Testing method explained pretty clearly and it does make sense. All the infant seats that I’ve seen have one latch point and they’re designed to handle frontal collisions. In a side impact all bets are off. The other thing to keep in mind is that they maxed out the weight limit on these seats. A 30lb infant in an infant carrier seat? Extreme yes, but the test provides excellent insight. There is still more to be done to make these seats safe. The government tests are very one dimensional and don’t take into account anything by low speed frontal impacts. 35 mph? Thats a head on collision between two cars in a parking lot obeying the speed limit. Not enough.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Consumer Reports is misleading us in this instance.
Take the fact that they make this statement in their article: “Infant car seats sold in Europe undergo more rigorous testing than do models sold in the U.S” This is actually untrue, according to one CPS tech named momika (http://www.car-seat.org/showthread.php?t=9763&page=4). She explains how tests in various countries differ, with each testing body having some weak tests and some strong tests.
Also, Consumer Reports points out that side-impacts tests of vehicles are tested at 38 MPH. But when they test the carseats, it seems they are just using a “sled”, not an actual vehicle to test them in. CPSDarren (same link as above) points out, “The whole point of securing a car seat to a vehicle is to give the child seat the advantage of the vehicle’s crushing frame to ride down the crash. I have been told by crash testing experts that a 30 mph side impact to a typical vehicle would be the rough equivalent of 14-18mph if the a child seat was tested on a laboratory sled. That’s not to say that testing at a higher speed isn’t valid, but it would be at a significantly higher energy than the overwhelming majority of real world crashes.” So is the 38 MPH test of a carseat on a sled even applicable to a real-world crash? Does the consumer report test actually tell us anything about the actual safety of our child?
I am all for safer carseats, but I definitely wonder if the whole point of the Consumer Report article is to sell magazines.
Oh, absolutely they’re milking this study to sell some magazines. Doesn’t matter how people react to the study, either way it sends eyeballs there way which means $$. There’s no such thing as bad press.
Again, what interests me is the simple physics. Enough force applied from the side of a car seat will cause it to detach. The question is how much force and is that realistic. Apparently it is since it is happening in the real world tests, but seems very infrequently. I also found it interesting because it illustrated the true failure point of these types of seats. I, like most people probably do, obsess over securing the base with the seat belt and LATCH. But now the weak point is the connection point between the carrier and the base…oh, hadn’t thought of that. Most of these seats have a small piece of metal that is designed to handle force in one axis, not the other.
Anyway, is this exploitive? Yup. Is there a real problem here? Yup, albeit one that is unlikely to affect many people. Question is whether it is something to worry about. Not really, but if it takes an exploitive article and some panicked soccer moms to get car seat manufacturers to beef up the seats, that works for me.
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”