For anyone wondering, assuming linear acceleration that's roughly 1 g. In a rear-facing seat, that's 1 g eyeballs-out, which should still be perfectly safe for the child, but possibly not for the cleanliness of the seat.
I think they’re referring to the fact that in the Ferrari, you’d experience both 1g eyeballs out plus the 1g of normal gravity, for a total of sqrt(2) at 45 degrees, when compared with looking at your feet producing 1g down.
I hate to sound inflammatory, but just to get everyone on the same page, and because I was wondering the same thing:
I thought Ferraris were show-off cars for the rich, and if you were rich enough to have one, and had a child, then you would (sensibly) own a separate, functional car when you actually intended to drive that child around (or employ some car/chauffeur service or whatever).
Edit: I googled Ferraris with back seats, and got this article which opens by acknowledging that people don't expect them to exist or for Ferraris to be kid friendly, so I think I (and the heavily downvoted GP) can be forgiven for harboring this misconception.
>>Adam Merlin, President at Merlin Auto Group, confidently answers, “Every time I speak about Ferraris being kid friendly, people think I’m nuts. And for the most part, I am. After all, even Ferraris that do have back seats often require the rear passenger to sacrifice leg room, so you can imagine peoples’ reactions when I allude to fitting car seats back there. However, after trying a plethora of Ferrari models, I can confidently say there are models you can choose from, if you have a family and still want to spoil yourself by driving a Ferrari.”
I have 0 experience installing a booster seat in a Ferrari, but frankly I would expect any form of child seat to be installable without risking this kind of incident.
I don't have the knowledge to get into any specifics about this. The point is just that there are plenty of valid use cases for having a child seat in a Ferrari.
First, some models do. I don't know about that particular one, because (shockingly) I don't own a Ferrari.
But second, that doesn't matter. Most places do not have laws that prohibit children in the front seat of cars, only that they use appropriate child seats. Further, child seats are typically required for _children_, not just infants. IIRC, for example, in Texas, child seats are required for any child under the age of 8, unless they are taller than 4'9". It is totally reasonable for a 7 year old to want to go for a ride in their parents "fancy" car. It's actually very responsible of this person to get a child seat properly installed in order to support that.
Absolutely not the case. A 5 point harness is best. A car seat converts two or three point harness to a 5 point. Which is great, because those soft little bodies need as many touch points as is possible to spread the load of force. We know for a fact that the 5 point harness is the best, that is why race car drivers use 5 point harnesses instead of lap belts.
The three point harness is a good compromise between the uselessness of a lap belt and the incovinience of a 5 point harness. But its certainly not as good as a 5. Point harness.
I think the other reason that street cars don't use five-point harnesses (and why using them is illegal in most states) is that they immobilize your shoulders and neck too well, which makes rollovers more dangerous without a roll cage. You can't lean forward when the roof collapses, so you can be paralyzed.
And also they're inconvenient and don't auto adjust.
3-point belts are made to be as quick and fool proof as possible so that people actually use them, and use them correctly. Importantly, they auto-retract so that they are worn in the proper position.
When you put on 5-point belts, you have to 4 times as many latches to operate, and you have to adjust all 5 belts -- and in the proper order. If you tighten the belts in the wrong order, they won't protect you properly. It is not intuitive -- I have a car with 5-points and the passengers who manage to figure out how to latch them almost universally tighten the belts wrong.
Dumb question: how do race cars and their drivers handle "blind spots"?
Edit to answer my own question: apparently they use spotters that radio in to them whether or not it's clear, and (at least in NASCAR) the cars don't have side mirrors but have an extra long rear view mirror.
When I was a kid on the farm, all the transmissions in the grain trucks were modified so you could only go forward. Too many accidents driving backwards with bad sight lines. Its a strange thing at first but you get used to always parking with a forward exit.
And less of a modification on an older farm -- backing up horses was hard enough that many older farms will already be designed for one-way traffic, with all eg barns allowing you to pull through.
huh, never thought of that before but that makes complete sense. All the farms I ever worked on were newer mostly created out of irrigation projects from the new deal. All mechanical at that point.
Lap belts are far from useless; they get you probably 80% of the value of a three point harness. Yes, your torso will flop forward, but particularly for a child's body size there's very little for them to hit.
The heads of very small children are quite heavy relative to the child's size. The concern with a baby is not that they'll hit something, it's that the weight of their head relative to their body will result in spinal injuries.
Consider for instance the $34 million verdict in Texas against Dorel, which failed to warn against placing children under the age of two in forward-facing seats. The kid Cayden was properly restrained in the back seat, but the weight of his head alone was enough to result in spinal injuries that have left him partially paralyzed for life.
We used to laugh at my kid when kid tried to reach for things on the floor and then fell on their head due to the weight of the head relative to the rest of the body -- but that's why rear-facing and five-point is important for children under 2,3 years old.
Oh yeah, a rear-facing infant seat is absolutely a difference-maker - from the talk about "child seats" I thought we were talking about forward-facing seats for children above 3, the benefits of which are pretty marginal AFAIK.
Except they're totally not, and saying that is dangerous.
Go look at crash tests of "child car seats" that are nothing more than a box ticking exercise which uses the adult seat, versus a properly engineering seat and you'll see what you are completely wrong.
That Freakonomics article is from 2007 and was only pointing out that manufacturers don't test all scenarios - not anything resembling your claim that they're just "safety theater". CDC strongly disagrees based on actual accident data (click risk reduction at the following link):
Is there any evidence for that? I know that for example women are more likely to be injured in car crashes because most car seats/interiors are designed around the average man so if be surprised if a human half didn't need to be raised or put in a safer position.
Airbags are not designed with the bodies of children or infants in rear-facing carseats in mind. They're actually really dangerous for them - potentially lethal.
And most vehicles have methods to disable airbags when the item/person occupying the seat can not safely handle it.
But if you want to get real sad, IIRC many airbag systems are not designed with an occupant outside the parameters of a typical adult male in mind. Some modern systems are getting better about this, but if you're too short, too tall, a woman, or other-wise-outside-of-the-norm, good luck.
It's worth noting that here in Australia cars have no such method, and you are not allowed to put a car seat in the front seat.
Equally when travelling as best I can tell all European cars have a method to do this and you can install in the front seat.
So this probably varies by country, but I am not sure which countries have what or where the USA is.
Without specifically checking I imagine that the Australian Design Rules basically wouldn't allow them to add the option even if they wanted to - if I had to guess because you're not allowed to have such a disable button (which you could argue could also be dangerous in some cases if pressed or used when it shouldn't be).
Very few women are of the expected size (5' 9" tall) aimed to represent the average male; most women automatically falls into the "too short / other-wise-outside-of-the-norm" as far as car safety testing was concerned until recently - AFAIK cars made since 2012 should be also tested on smaller, female-sized dummies which also created an incentive to alter how they are built.
Well if that's it then making a list of "too short, too tall, a woman" is double-counting.
Also if you take it as exactly 5'9" then airbags aren't suitable for men either. What you need to do is examine the range it's designed for. It's not the average height that matters, it's what percent of men/women fall inside that range. There might be a significant difference in that percent, or there might not be.
That analysis has been done, and there is a significant difference in that amount. You can back-of-the-envelope it yourself if you know that the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4" with a standard deviation of about 3.5".
> Airbags are not designed with the bodies of children or infants in rear-facing carseats in mind.
According to FMVSS 208, they're tested using an unbelted 50th percentile size male dummy. That's the reason they deploy with more force and are triggered at lower impact speed had they been designed with belted occupants of varying sizes in mind.
They are tested without belts to ensure the airbag doesn't kill idiots not wearing their belts. But on all modern cars they're designed to work together with the seatbelts.
If you unplug the cable at the bottom of a BMW seat (so it doesn't know the seat occupancy and belts) it will disable the airbag and show an airbag light.
Many modern cars have the ability to disable the front passenger airbag, for when you do need/want to put the seat in the front.
And, for some cars, the front seat is safer for everyone, including children, thanks to the focus on improving the safety ratings for front seat passengers (which are often advertised) [1]. For example, my car last car had side curtain airbags only in the front.
On average, especially with older cars, I assume the CDC is probably right. Their recommendations necessarily have to be the most useful for the average/masses.
No but for tiny little newborns, all are. Something about not having proper muscle structure around spine to handle thrust forward during frontal (most common) crash. Also reason why you should never shake babies or expose them to any form of higher G.
We're changing the child seat to front facing right now - our baby is 10 months old. It can be done little bit earlier but not too much.
> In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released new recommendations for car seat safety. As part of these recommendations, they removed their previous age-based recommendation that children remain rear facing in car seats until the age of 2.
> The AAP now suggests that children remain rear facing until they reach their rear-facing car seat’s weight/height limits which, for most children, will leave them rear-facing beyond the previous age recommendation.
My wife and I got into an argument about this when it was time to switch our kids car seat so I pulled up their recommendations and read their sources. Their cited evidence doesn't support their recommendation at all (nor did it when they first made the rec in 2011).
Their 2011 rear facing recommendation is based on a retracted article and their 2016 rec is based on the same article's data except using a smaller dataset which they acknowledge is not statistically significant. The only other data cited looks at rear facing Swedish children compared to _unbelted_ Swedish children.
I went back and reread it to make sure I was remembering right. I'm dumbfounded that this was allowed not only to stand as a rec, but was increased (deepened? made stronger?) when they had even less data than they did before. I get that it feels like it should be safer, but that's not science and I would have expected a group making medical and safety recs to maintain a higher standard.
I didn't say they were all rear-facing. lisper asked "Why couldn't you put a car seat in the front passenger seat of a two-seater?" I don't know anything about safety of front-facing or booster seats for kids in front seats. But I think my response was a reasonable answer/example of when you wouldn't want to put a car seat in the front passenger seat.
