Safe Speed Forums

Have I missed something here?

The way I read these statistics, only 24 children got killed in cars in 2004. Where does the "2000 lives" bit come from? Of those 24 children, how many were un-restrained?

Couple of other thoughts:

1. What's the point of having an Isofix booster cushion? They don't get fastened to the car anyway, they just sit there on the seat!

2. Moving the top belt anchorage down low enough is commonly done on buses with something called an "all-ages" belt. It just has a sliding clip that runs down an extra piece of webbing and lowers the (effective) top anchorage so it sits comfortably on the child's shoulder.

3. The main advantage of the booster seat isn't that it moves the shoulder up so much as that it moves the pelvis up. Generally, kids (under 1.35m tall) tend to sit with their legs stuck out in front of them on an adult car seat. This tilts the pelvis back (which is already lower than an adult's pelvis in the same seat anyway) and makes the lap part of the belt more likely to ride up into the soft parts of the abdomen causing nasty internal injuries (liver damage predominantly).

4. There is an exemption for cars where there isn't enough room to fit three child seats side-by-side. My wife's car is like this. Even if the seats can fit, it's sometimes impossible to buckle them up because the neighbouring seats are in the way. We've gone for the expensive (environmetally too!) option of an MPV with three rows of seats.

5. Side-facing seats are pretty much a death sentence anyway in a crash - for adults OR kids. There's no real point in putting seat belts or indeed child restriants, booster cushions etc on sideways facing seats. You just have to resign yourself to dying if you have a big crash.

6. I usually take my 8 year old daughter's 9 year old friend to the school bus stop in the morning. My daughter has never known anything other than a child seat of one form or another and is pretty sanguine about it. The 9 year old kicked up merry hell (principal objection being that it was uncool!) A quick word with her mum along the lines of "if she won't go in the booster seat she's not coming in my car and you'll have to get up and take her yourself" soon did the trick.

7. Proper "Group 0 or 1" child seats (the rear-facing infant carrier types and the forward facing ones with an integral harness) are very expensive but booster cushions are dirt cheap. Is it really such a problem to have a couple of spares kicking round in the boot or at granny's house ifyou have young kids?

I would imagine if you withold permissison you will have to go to court to defend the charge.

What would be more worrying is if the police stop you, but they didn't have a tape measure and you were forced to go to court because in their opinion the child looked too short.

When? Six month's later? How would they preserve the evidence? Do you know how fast kids grow?

Seems certain shops are cashing in on the new regulations, telling parents they need a new seat because it hasn't got the correct EC mark when that part of the regulations doesn't come in until 2008.