Auto Makers Faulted Over Child Safety
The nation’s top traffic safety watchdog plans to rebuke car makers and government regulators today for not doing enough to protect children.
“Let’s be honest. Despite overwhelming statistics indicating the need for better protection for children, child passenger safety has been an afterthought when it comes to designing cars,” James E. Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in remarks prepared for delivery at the New York International Automobile Show.
Safety features have become a favored marketing pitch for car makers, and the New York show is one of the industry’s showcase events. But in a comment that may feel like a splash of cold water, Hall added: “There has been little or no focus on protecting the smallest, most vulnerable occupants.”
Hall’s speech comes amid increasing attention by government, parents and industry to the safety of children in cars. According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among children 1 and older. Of the 2,656 children killed in 1997, 67% were passengers in cars.
Hall, whose agency recommends ways to prevent transportation accidents, proposed that auto makers redesign the back seats of cars as envelopes of safety for children. Since most fatal crashes involve head-on collisions, experts believe that the back seat offers a safer environment for children.
Auto makers have long said that parents’ complacency is a bigger threat to children than the design of their cars. Indeed, more than 60% of child passengers under 14 who are killed in crashes are not strapped in by seat belts or child safety seats.
“Parental behavior swamps the hardware aspect of it,” said Al Slechter, director of regulatory affairs for DaimlerChrysler Corp.
But Hall has a list of automobile hardware issues that he contends must not be ignored, even as law enforcement and safety groups stress that parents buckle up their kids. These include:
* Adjustable shoulder belts in the back seats of cars that would provide more comfortable fits for older children. An easy fit would encourage more of these children to stay in their belts. Car makers include front seat adjustable shoulder belts as standard equipment in new cars, but very few--among them Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz and Saab--offer them in the back seat.
* Lap and shoulder belts in the rear center seat, which is said to be the safest place to put a child. Although most new passenger sedans now offer these as standard equipment, they generally are not found in minivans and sport-utility vehicles, which are widely used as family cars.
* Improving on a new federal safety rule that requires new cars to come with a simple, snap-in attachment system for child safety seats. The rule now calls for attachment points in the left and right seating positions of the back seat, but Hall said that an attachment point should also be available in the center.
* Special attention to the potential consequences for children of side air bags, which are expected to become increasingly available in new cars. The traffic safety agency has asked car makers to carefully test these air bags, and there is debate in the industry about whether they should be offered in the back seat at all. A child who falls asleep against a door could be walloped by an air bag and injured.
Hall also criticized another federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for setting safety standards. Parents are being encouraged to place children 12 and younger in the back seat for better protection. But Hall noted that there are no safety administration crash tests that currently measure what happens to children in the back seat, nor any safety standards on minimum protections.
In the last couple of years, police have stepped up enforcement of child seat laws that cover infants and toddlers in all 50 states. Many police departments are also offering clinics to teach parents how to properly install the seats, since studies have shown that parents make mistakes about 90% of the time.
And, addressing concerns about older children, a Transportation Department advisory panel recently recommended that parents be encouraged to put children ages 5 through 9 in booster seats, cushion-like devices that allow adult seat belts to properly fit.
“With all the creative minds designing vehicles throughout the industry, I’m sure that more effective designs can be developed to make vehicles safer for children, at modest cost,” Hall said. “We cannot create fixes that only allow families who can afford the more expensive cars to have access to the best safety devices.”
