CHICAGO — In a government crash-test video, the infant car seat flies off of its base, smashing the baby dummy — still strapped into the carrier — upside down and face-first into the back of the driver’s seat.
Think what could happen in a real crash.
This seat was one of 31 that either flew off their bases or exceeded injury limits in a series of frontal crashes conducted by federal researchers using 2008 model year vehicles, a Chicago Tribune investigation found. The test results were never publicized, and even some infant-seat makers were unaware of their existence.
The Tribune found the results buried in thousands of pages of test reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These tests are used to rate the safety of cars, not the child restraints in them.
The results call into question the rigor of the safety standards for such seats. The investigation also highlights how little information parents are armed with as they make one of the most important safety decisions for their babies.
Responding to the Tribune investigation, new Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Friday that he ordered a “complete top to bottom review of child safety seat regulations” and directed the NHTSA to make the crash-test results “more available” to consumers.
Of the 66 infant seats tested in frontal crashes, nearly half of the seats either separated from their bases or exceeded injury limits.
The government describes the tests as research. But the results for two seats were so troubling that NHTSA recalled those seat models.
The infant restraint in the crash video, the Graco SafeSeat, flew off its base, but the NHTSA said it didn’t seek a recall because the seat remained connected in five other vehicle tests and, thus, it was “not a repeatable event.”
Graco has sold more than 600,000 SafeSeats. In a statement, Graco’s parent company dismissed as “anomalous” the one SafeSeat test where the seat separated. Dale Matschullat, general counsel for Newell Rubbermaid, wrote in a letter to the Tribune that all the crash tests were “purely experimental” and are “worthless for purposes of evaluating and comparing infant restraint system performance.”
The NHTSA said it is analyzing all of the test results and doesn’t yet know what they mean. If infant seats performed as poorly on American roads as they did in these crash tests, said Ron Medford, NHTSA’s acting deputy administrator, “We would expect to see higher numbers of fatalities or serious injuries than we’re aware of.”
In 2007, 63 babies were killed and about 7,000 were injured in crashes where they were strapped into infant restraints.
The allegation that the infant seats were improperly installed during NHTSA’s crash tests was common among the car-seat makers. But federal safety officials stressed that all car seats were installed by highly trained technicians.
