Child Safety Seats

Seat belts, children’s car seats and other safety restraints are supposed to make your family safer in the event of an accident. And when properly used, they usually do. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration consistently reports that seat belt use turns fatal accidents into injury accidents; in 2005, the agency reported that 30 percent of unbelted people were ejected from their vehicles in accidents, but only one percent of belted people were ejected. About 36 percent of passenger vehicle occupants involved in fatal accidents that year were unbelted and the agency estimates that seatbelts saved 211,128 lives between 1957 and 2005. And child car seats, when properly used, accounted for only 0.7 percent of fatalities in traffic accidents in 2005. But when safety restraints are defective or so confusing that they’re hard to use right, they can actually cause more injuries in a crash than their users would otherwise have sustained.

Thanks to public awareness campaigns by traffic and law enforcement authorities, most safety-conscious parents and caregivers now know that they should use car seats or booster seats with most young children, and put children under 13 in the back seats. But recently, it has been discovered that not all car seats are as safe as we expect them to be -- even some seats that claim to meet federal crash safety standards. Cars must pass two frontal crash tests and one side-impact test; children’s car seats must pass only the slower of the two frontal crashes. Tests published in early 2007 by Consumer Reports magazine found that several seats didn’t meet even that standard, although their advertising claimed to. The culprits included:

Consumer Reports has called for a recall of the Discovery and the Comfort seats, saying they’re dangerous to families and children. The investigators also suggested that the federal government set stricter safety standards to match the ones set by the European Union; European seats consistently performed better on their tests.

The magazine’s study also found several problems with the federally mandated LATCH system, which is designed to help parents and caregivers fasten seats more securely to their vehicles. LATCH has been included in all car seats and vehicles sold after 2002, but Consumer Reports found that seats attached with the LATCH system failed more often than seats attached with just a seat belt. The investigators also discovered that LATCH is often not available in the center back seat, which is considered the safest place for a child. And the NHTSA compounded LATCH’s problems with a study released in late 2006, showing that many well-meaning parents are still unaware of or confused by LATCH. Among those with vehicles equipped with LATCH, only about 42 percent of adult caregivers were using it correctly; 31 percent were only using a seatbelt to attach the child’s car seat. These design defects put thousands of babies at risk every day, despite their caregivers’ sincere best efforts.

Adult safety restraint systems pose problems as well. Again, thanks to public safety campaigns, many people now realize that airbags aren’t safe for children, especially infants in rear-facing car seats, who can be killed or seriously injured by the force of a deploying air bag. But not everyone realizes that older children and adults under 5’5” may also be hit in the face by airbags included in cars before 1998, and sustain head and eye injuries, suffocation or broken bones. That’s why the NHTSA suggests that children under 13 should always ride in the back seat, and that shorter drivers should set their seats back as far as possible and use booster seats or other tools to reach controls. And people of all sizes and ages are at risk from defective airbags that fail to inflate in an accident; “oversensitive” air bags that inflate for no apparent reason, causing injuries and possibly an accident due to loss of driver control; or airbags that leak the chemicals used to inflate them, exposing the vehicle’s occupants to chemical inhalation and severe, unnecessary burns.

And occupants of all ages are at risk from defective seat belts -- belts that fail in an accident, even though their users trusted them. Defective seatbelts are negligently or even knowingly installed by manufacturers that in some cases knew they were unsafe. Defective seat belts can include:

Since 1978, BISNAR | CHASE has represented hundreds of clients who were failed by a safety restraint when they needed it the most. Many of these clients suffered serious damages, including a wrongful death, brain damage, paralysis, multiple fractures and serious burns. If you or someone you love trusted a safety restraint that turned out to be defective or unsafe in an accident, you deserve justice. An experienced auto products defect attorney like the ones at BISNAR | CHASE can help you evaluate your case, file a claim, and get the best possible result in a court of law. But the statute of limitations in auto accident cases can be short, so it’s important to act quickly to preserve your right to your day in court. For a free, no-obligation consultation, call us as soon as possible at 1-800-561-4846 or visit our convenient online case evaluation form here.

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