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Keeping Our Kids Safe: Child Car Seat Safety-Amazingly Little Federal/State Regulation Leaves Kids Vulnerable
By: Richard N. Shapiro, HSCLA AttorneyThe makers of child car seats have a major business advantage among typical companies-they make the one children’s product that each and every parent, by law, must utilize in their car for children. Parents presume that state or federal regulators guarantee that child car seats are safe but amazingly little federal regulation governs car seat safety, and the myriad types of cars interiors left many car seats without a proper fit. And the federal safety ratings for car seats leave much to be desired, especially for late model cars.
For example, look at the situation involving a Cosco Touriva child car seat. An Oregon based trauma nurse tried to figure out what caused an 18 month old child’s skull fracture in a fairly low speed crash involving that car seat. She then contact Cosco and warned them about the potential dangers of a small child’s head being injured by hitting the edge of a hard, small indentation on the hard plastic the surrounds the child’s head area, even though there was the typical padding over the plastic seat back. Later, a Texas family also figured out that the indentation also caused serious injury after their daughter suffered brain damage in a crash. Finally, after personal injury litigation the companies own engineers labeled the indentation just a “child safety concern” according to an article in the Chicago Tribune written by Patricia Callahan.
Dorel Industries, the owner of Cosco, sold hundreds of thousands of these car seats before removing this small notch from versions of the car seat 5 years after receiving the inquiry and information from the nurse from Oregon. According to the Chicago Tribune article child car seats that are designed to protect our most vulnerable and precious cargo-our children, undergo far less testing then the car itself or the car seat belts. The Tribune reports that car seat manufacturers are mainly governed by “self-reporting” instead of rigorous government examinations and inspections.
For example, even if a car seat breaks into many pieces the manufacturer doesn’t have to tell this to the government if that particular type of test falls outside the narrow testing requirements the government imposes.
In 2005 236 children died and about 33,000 suffered personal injuries while strapped into their child car safety seats in crashes involving cars or trucks. However, the statistics don’t really say whether the deaths of the children are from a car seat failure or simply from an impact or other event in the crash. Even the chief administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates child car seats says that the products are effective but that testing does need to be improved. Nicole Nason said she is committed to adding side impact tests for child car seats and would like to see the speed of frontal crash tests increase from 30 to 35 miles per hour in the tests.
The prior head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Dr. Ricardo Martinez, who was administrator under former President Bill Clinton, has explained that federal standards for car seats are so narrowly defined that the seats can have major defects just several miles an hour over the 30 mile an hour frontal test and still be passed as safe.
The Problem Is Also Properly Restraining Car Seats Inside Various Cars
Again, the seats are only tested for front end collisions. Of course, this doesn’t mean that car seats that survive a front end collision will be safe in other circumstances to protect against injury or death to our children.
Government testing requires side impact, and roll over scenarios be tested but child car safety seats only are required to undergo the frontal test which is an amazing lack of regulation. Serious personal injury and even death to children occur in fairly low impact side crashes and this is well known. Martinez, the former NHTSA administrator argued that child car safety seats should have ratings the same way we rate cars and trucks in testing. However, in 2005 under the Bush Administration, the agency announced it would not implement such a rating system.
One of the most controversial car safety seat features was the Dorel Shield-Booster. This design fits against a child’s abdomen or stomach between the car seat back and a plastic shield, but provided little restraint to the upper body of smaller children. While this particular Dorel Shield-Booster passed U.S. Governmental mandated safety tests, some smaller children, at lower weights, were ejected in actual crashes and many lawsuits were filed relating to children suffering spinal injuries. Dorel Industries denied all fault in these cases but several lawsuits settled for millions of dollars according to court records. For example, Dorel had one warning in Canada, that these boosters were only safe for children over 40 pounds. On the other hand, it told U.S. consumers that the same seat was safe for children as light at 30 pounds. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in 1996 advised parents not to use these for children under 40 pounds.
Returning back to the story of the child car seat called the Touriva, manufactured by Dorel, a look at the pictures of this car seat show that the indentations or notches on both sides of the area on the hard plastic car seat, are actually hidden under the fabric on both sides. Only by peeling back the fabric does a parent notice that there are fairly innocent looking indentations. However, at a high speed when a child’s head suddenly snaps to one side or the other these indentations alone can cause a skull fracture or serious injury or death. Dorel, under pressure because of lawsuits, actually designed two pieces of plastic that would fit into the indentation or notch on both sides. However, Dorel never implemented the fix and there was evidence that it would have cost $0.24 per seat but Dorel also determined that the “fix” might have popped off from the indentation areas in a crash also and so it abandoned this particular corrective measure. According to one of the lawsuits Dorel did $25 million dollars in sales in 2001 alone with respect to this seat that later became a product liability issue. As late at 2005--several years after receiving product liability warnings--Dorel was still making the Touriva car seat with the hidden notch problem. Quite amazing.
Dorel has quietly settled a number of these lawsuits, many for substantial sums, while denying all liability. However, for some of these children it is too late as many suffered brain damage, closed head injuries, and even paralysis.
Our law firm has addressed these and related child safety issues in other articles that may be seen on this website. We have also handled personal injury litigation cases involving children and car safety seat issues. Please review other “Keeping Our Kids Safe” articles in our library, and call us if we can address any injury matters for you or your family.
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