Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, wants changes in where parents to instructed to put child safety seats in vehicles.
Officials at auto safety advocacy group the Center for Auto Safety are taking federal regulators to task for not providing parents with more detailed information about the safest spot in a vehicle for a child.
The group filed a petition this week imploring the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to provide information about where specifically to put a child in a vehicle.
Officials “encourage parents to place their children in the rear seats of passenger cars without providing parents any recommendation on where in the rear seat the child should be placed,” Clarence Ditlow, executive director, wrote in his petition.
“While the rear seat is the safest location for a child, it is safer still if the child is placed behind an unoccupied front seat or behind the lightest front-seat occupant.”
For decades, NHTSA’s official guidance to parents has been to put children in rear seats because of the dangers posed by front airbags. However, this move has exposed children to a new issue: seatback collapses.
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There have been nearly 900 instances between 1990 and 2014, according to the group, in which children seated behind front-seat occupants died in rear-impact crashes. In these collisions, the seats collapse onto the child seat, crushing the child. These statistics do not count the countless incidents of injuries sustained by children.
Compounding the problem is the fact that children are often placed behind the driver, usually the father, so it’s easier for the front seat passenger, most often the child’s mother, to tend to the needs of the child.
Recently a Texas jury awarded more than a $124.5 million verdict against Audi for a problem car companies admit would only cost a couple of dollars to fix. A then-seven-year-old was sitting behind the driver, his father, who was hit from behind.
While the father suffered minor injuries, the boy behind him suffered brain injuries and will need assistance for the rest of his life, according a CBS News report. The boy’s younger brother, who was sitting next to him, behind an unoccupied seat was unharmed. It should be noted that the injured boy was not in a booster seat or buckled into his seat.
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Audi intends to appeal the verdict.
Over the years, there have been many calls to strengthen the front seats in cars. According to Ditlow, recommendations to make them 20 times stronger than regulations currently require. In addition to reducing the instances in which a child is endangered, it could also improve the safety for the seat occupants as well.
A 2008 study by the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, reviewed by NHTSA, found “a doubling of the injury risk” to children if the seat in front of them “deformed” or suffered some form of a collapse in a rear end collision, CBS reported.
Seventy-one percent of the crashes studied involved a car where there were occupants seated in front of children, and “deformation of the front seat back into the child’s space was reported in eight percent of cases.”
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“Until cars on the American highway are equipped with adequately strong front seats and seatbacks, children in rear seats behind occupied front seats will continue to be in danger of death or severe injury from front seatback failures in rear-end impacts,” Ditlow wrote.