Are Automobile Seats Putting Kids’ Lives in Danger?

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Do you instinctively put your young children in the back seat of your vehicle? For decades parents have heard the message that the safest place to put your child in a vehicle is in the rear seat, but recently the issue of seat back failures has called into question whether children are indeed safe in the back seat. In one recent case of seat back failure, a Texas jury ordered Audi to pay a family $124.5 million in compensation for the permanent brain damage suffered by their ii-year-old son when his father’s driver’s seat collapsed in a 2012 rear-end crash.

Seat back failure happened when a vehicle is struck from the rear causing the front seat to give way launching the body of the driver backward with tremendous force and landing on whomever is in the seat behind them. CBS News investigated the issue and found that every day in the United States, three children are killed and 470 are injured in car crashes; 11 percent of those child accident victims are seated in the rear seat where government safety experts recommend that children sit.

Children can be injured and lose their lives when the seat back in front of them fails and an adult body launches backward and crashes into them. Adults can also become injured when there is no one sitting behind them and their head strikes the back seat.

Examining the problem

Alan Cantor has been looking at seat back failures since the 1980s. He says that seat backs fail in rear-end crashes every day. The problem is that the federal standards for seat back strength is ridiculously low. At Cantor’s lab outside of Philadelphia, the CBS News asked Cantor to demonstrate the safety standard, which a banquet chair was able to withstand without breaking. With federal safety standards so low, automakers can boast about how they meet and exceed federal safety standards, but that does not necessarily mean that the seat backs provide anything more than the lowest level of protection in a rear-end crash.

The Center for Auto Safety (CAS) an automotive safety watchdog organization, said in a story on the Auto Blog, that federal regulators should issue update guidance to parents and caregivers on the safest place for children to sit in the rear seat. Clarence Ditlow of CAS wrote, “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.” The Center for Auto Safety has found 22 lawsuits involving children who were killed or seriously injured while sitting the back seat when an occupied front seat back collapsed into a child seated in the rear seat. In many of the cases, the child was seated behind the father who is larger and heavier.

Automakers are aware of how inadequate the standards are. In fact, during rear-end crash tests, a GM engineer admitted that they started strapping the crash test dummies to the seats because the dummies kept getting broken during these tests and dummies are expensive. One engineer interviewed for the CBS story said that strengthening the seat backs might cost a dollar or so. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) standard is flawed and inadequate and it has been in place unchanged since 1992. NHTSA officials declined to comment about seat back standards for the story. The NHTSA provided CBS with a statement explaining why investigations into the need to change seat back standards ended in 2004.

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