Is there any data that says secondhand car seats aren’t safe?
marketplace.org
marketplace.org
This hints to at least one good reason: so defective designs or models don't linger too long. Similarly, manufacturers have an interest, a priori, in discouraging a second-hand market to limit their exposure if and when any defects are found, especially if they lead to injuries. Of course, the most important reason is almost certainly because planned obsolescence leads to more sales.
> Instead of destroying 500,000 used seats over the years, Target could have safely marketed them to emerging markets. They would’ve sold, and many children would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market.
Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished.
I think drug companies do dump pharmaceuticals near their expiration date into cheaper markets. But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used. Interestingly, AFAIU the expiration date for many drugs is also largely pulled out of thin air; they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date. OTOH, proving efficacy can be more difficult and risky.
Two weeks after the new computers were setup the local paper ran a front page (thankfully below the fold) article on how we had dumped junk computers on the school. All of the quotes from the teachers were anonymous but it was obvious they were upset they didn't get the newest toys to play with. The e-rate scandal a few years previous hit the school and others like it pretty hard so until then they were accustomed to getting everything new-in-box. The principal did call the university to apologize and express gratitude for the computers but the damage to the university's public image and the partnership between the schools was already done. The volunteer work continued but it faded out over the next couple of years.
We stopped that after people were complaining that their received goods did not have a good print or that the print somehow was "off-topic" or whatever.
Now everything that gets returned is going straight to the trash.
It's true that car seats have been great for safety. But a lot of that (if not most) is that it forced parents to put their kids in the back seat of the car (much safer) in most cases and always secured by a belt. The idea that a newer car seat has some magic safety improvement that is say, more important then the difference in safety between a mini-van and a two seat sportscar is a fallacy. If you are worried about your kid being safe in a car, put them in a minivan and have them sit in a car seat in the middle back. Even with an old car seat that is very safe.
The response[1] from actual medical professionals, and particularly this quote is interesting
> As pediatricians, scientists and leaders of the world's largest study on children in crashes, we think that overinterpretation of findings from a single source of data led Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt (July 10) to claim that child safety seats are no more effective than seat belts for 2- to 6-year-olds. They examined children in fatal crashes (about 1,200 per year) while ignoring the equally informative data on those in nonfatal crashes (450,000 per year). Our research, which includes over 25,000 in-depth interviews and over 800 crash investigations, consistently shows that child safety seats and booster seats significantly lower the risk of serious injury compared to seat belts alone. Their conclusions stand in stark contrast to the existing body of scientific data that support current child restraint recommendations, and are, in our opinion, irresponsible and dangerous.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/letters.html
Because it's the law and you run afoul of child endangerment laws if you don't.
After watching Levitt's TED talk and reading the remarks from Durbin and Winston, I tried to find some published research about the matter and didn't have much luck. Levitt was very specific about what they looked at and how the conduced their research. Their conclusion was that it warranted further research. Durbin and Winston's comments were very general and came off as very "trust us".
I'm wondering if anyone else might have a link to one of their actual studies?
I like the suggest Levitt made of automakers integrating 5 point child harnesses into backseats. This seems like such an obvious improvement that could be an upgrade option when purchasing a new vehicle.
It's amazing how hostile people are to that chapter. It's just a book talking about statistics, I really doubt it influenced anyone's behavior
What that chapter should say, is that if you're ever in an accident fatal for your child, it doesn't matter if it used a seat or not. It completely neglect to say that for non fatal accidents, the vast majority, the car seats do make a difference.
It's also not magic getting your children into a car seat. It takes time, the angles are awkward, and when parked on a busy road it often exposes parents to traffic. I've only heard of 1 fatal accident through where a parent was struck by a car (sideswiped) while fiddling with a car seat.
1. with 3 kids we have to transport a whole lot of stuff when we travel and minivans have more weatherproof storage space than most other vehicles
2. a minivan is super functional for transporting things which aren't humans (it's effectively an 8 foot covered bed pickup with the rear seats removed). I brought a twin sized box spring home from the store inside the van *WITH* 2 kids in the middle row this past weekend, try that in most SUVs.
3. the sliding doors are SOOOO much nicer to use in tight parking spots for loading/unloading
4. minivans get as good or better fuel economy as compared to larger SUVs
5. minivans cost less than many SUVs to own and operateIt would be ridiculous to try to transport a five child family these days.
Not to mention minivans exist and aren’t that expensive compared to cars.
(You do need relatively compact seats; I'm using the cheapest Walmart seat)
This is, I will point out, the same reason "expired" or almost "expired" produce and groceries get destroyed or thrown away instead of donated. In almost all cases the food is still perfectly safe, and most stores assume (incorrectly) that they would be liable for any illness caused by "expired" food. But the optics would also look terrible because most people just don't realize that food doesn't magically go from perfectly safe to toxic the instant it does beyond the date written on the package. I have a friend who runs a homeless charity and she tried to get the (many) grocery stored to donate constantly. Almost all of the chains have corporate policy against it for liability reasons.
We had an “in” with a local grocery store. They would throw the leftover food out by placing it in nicely on the back dock instead of the dumpster.
"Oh, I thought that £500 of fresh rump steak was expired. Whoops. No, I have no idea how my old school friend happened to know I'd made that mistake so as to arrive in a truck less than a minute after I carefully stacked the boxes of steak in the disposal area".
For stuff with a Best Before rather than Use By tag all the cheaper stores I use just mark it down. Crisps that "expired" two months ago probably aren't as crisp as they intended (moisture in the outside air will very slowly penetrate even the metalized foil container) but they're not dangerous, if your budget is tight maybe 50% off is a good deal on those crisps. For Use By stuff yeah, probably eating these cooked chicken slices on Tuesday after they expired on Monday won't kill me, but I get where they're coming from. It's about margin, just like on aircraft. If you're on a twin-engine jetliner and it loses the left engine in cruise, that plane is still fine, it was designed to handle the stress of maximum power take-off on a single engine every time. It could definitely still go to your destination. But it won't - it's completely understandable that we always treat that plane as an emergency and try to get it down immediately for the sake of safety margin.
I personally love the concept and use it a lot at both supermarkets and bakeries.
Shouldn't defective designs be recalled right away instead of at expiration date?
My parents gave me some Duplos from the 80s. After looking it up, the red and yellow bricks contained unsafe levels of cadmium. Legos are often advertised as being lifetime toys that can be passed down but this just isn't true.
I'd like to see mandatory UPC codes etched into toys/car seats/strollers so that they can be identified for recalls. That way this nonsense about 'expiry' of otherwise durable goods can stop while overall safety improves.
In case there is a flaw, e.g. poisons; unexpected decay of material strength; mold growth, then it's good to reduce the number of the old product around in case it's discovered, and a lawsuit manifests. Possibly the expiration could even mitigate damages in case of liability.
While superfluous product expiry is generally useful for selling more of any kind of product, a safety device for children is exactly the kind of product where mitigating liability from latent design flaws would be desirable for a manufacturer.
Note that author is referring to used car seats, not expired ones. Comparing used car seats to used drugs is not very fair. A closer sense for "used" when referring to a car seat compared to what "used" means for a drug would probably be one that was involved in a crash, and that is not what the article is mentioning.
But to your point this won't happen. Besides the supply chain nightmare and risks if the seats were effectively involved in a crash, that would make the whole campaign moot: how do you justify why you should throw a used car seat away and then send it to another country?
And we most certainly don't want that if the goal is to sell AMAP car seats
With the exception of few drugs that do go bad "often" is not good enough, AFAIU it's a statistical game of certainties- I want to be X% certain that the drug has Y% of its potency
I used the same hand me down car seats for both my kids. I also bought one actual car seat of the larger variety at one point because the technology actually did improve some. The booster seats chap my hide--an uncomfortable hunk of plastic for a kid to sit on so I can be legally compliant but are a stone-cold bitch for the kid to sit on during long car rides. As soon as my kids looked big enough I tossed those booster seats in the trash where they belong.
It is all safety meddling by a bunch of busy-body twats who either have a profit motive or just enjoy authoritarianism. It is the same mindset that gave us Prohibition. Saving us from ourselves only to create a much bigger problem in the long run. How many times have we seen that play out? Alcohol (we sort of of fixed that one, yay), drugs (cartels--been to Mexico lately?), healthcare (the costs, my word!) , automobiles (how many more airbags do we need?), student loans (but everyone should be able to go to college and become debt slaves), housing bubble (everyone should be able to afford to buy their own home), you name it, the meddlers have wrecked it. I pretty much lay all of it at the feet of do-gooding Democrats, but I know that Republicans are equally to blame because they do it for banker profit motive reasons rather than misguided altruism.
Good rebuttal of the car seat story here, with lots of links: https://thecarseatlady.com/freakonomics-fallacy-an-economist...
This is one of the few unrelated looks into the topic and it shows relatively minimal benefits. Likely still worth it, but less critical than generally perceived. https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo...
The LATCH system is seems to be bolted on, but not always used. It’s still going to bounce in a crash as the seat cushion has a lot of give under these forces. Further, in terms of real world companions you need to understand people don’t nessisarily use safety equipment correctly especially if it’s more time consuming. Comparing LATCh attachment vs seat belts is a whole other discussion.
Proper installation with a seatbelt involves engaging the retractor so it has basically no play at all.
It's true that improper installation is quite common, though.
> The LATCH system is seems to be bolted on, but not always used. It’s still going to bounce in a crash as the seat cushion has a lot of give under these forces.
A forward-facing seat using LATCH should usually be installed with three point LATCH (the third is over the seat back), so without much play in any direction, certainly not forward.
Two point LATCH can move up-down and side-to-side a bit, but still not forward.
"While it may be possible that an improperly installed car seat may not be any more effective than a seat belt alone, and that probably accounts for at least some of the Freakanomics data, that is a SOLVABLE problem. Ditching the car seat is one “solution,” but I would argue that a much better solution would be to meet with a child passenger safety technician to make sure your car seat is being used in a manner that would keep your child as safe as possible. “Other people don’t use car seats correctly, so I won’t use one at all” is a rather absurd conclusion, don’t you think?"
That point aside, the bigger one is that they concentrate on fatalities more than injuries, where there is a ton of data on the effectiveness of seats for children older than 2.
Generally speaking, Freakonomics does raise many interesting points that make you think more critically about causality. But more often than not they end up drawing a blanket conclusion that is as lazy and un-nuanced as the one they claim to have debunked.
That's not going to explain the data. The numbers require seat belts to be about as safe as car seats for children 2+ on average. Thus, unless an improperly installed car seat was significantly worse than an average seat belt, it's all kind of a wash.
Anyway, this is more about public policy than individual choice. If your spending public money to promote something it must increase the average safety levels or your wasting peoples money.
PS: As to improper use, when swapping multiple car seats it’s very easy to forget to attach one. With seat belts it’s more visually obvious their not in use. That’s a huge safety risk and could account for the unexpected data.
Otherwise it’s difficult for something to meaningfully reduce injuries without also preventing deaths. Unless you have a better explanation?
latch/isofix has limitations which is why it's not the de facto install mechanism across the board. there's a 65lb weight limit on most anchors (including the car seat - which can be 30+lbs by itself), and most sedans don't have a set in the middle rear seating position but a lot of people will incorrectly install it that way.
it is okay for a car seat to have a little give. they're designed not to be installed so tight it damages your car in the process. rear facing car seats will sometimes flip into the seat back and 'cocoon' in more severe accidents, and that's by design.
People worry like crazy about if they have the wrong child seat, when in my experience they have no idea if the smoke detector in their house has a battery.
That said, in the UK there's plenty of second hand car seats changing hands via ebay etc.
* incidentally I've heard the same thing said about bicycle helmets, which use similar materials (plastic, polystyrene)
I'd sooner wear someone else's dirty underwear.
And marketers know this.
If the seats are rendered useless/unsafe by unseeable damage then shouldn't they have integral g-force indicators (like you get to indicate proper parcel handling)?
My hard drives get banged around in shipping but they are relatively safe from failure in that shipped state. When it is unboxed, banging it is a bit dubious but may work without failure. While it’s running and banged around is a sure fire way to drive failure.
It might read as a sarcasm, but I've seen way too many mums (dads much less) that have mindset somewhere along those lines. Something about over-compensating otherwise non-ideal parenting approach to be polite.
They are very simple though, essentially being polystyrene and some padding for comfort. It would be easy for an inquisitive adult to assess it's state but most people are far too concerned with other things to risk it.
If you think I'm being overly harsh on the average adult then I refer you to the mass of drivers that pay hundreds of pounds for a car seat for their child and then text while driving. Humans are very poor at assessing risk.
In fact, there's always some inherent risk that the item you're buying is damaged in an unnoticeable way, even if it is new. What if your car seat has a manufacturing defect? What if it was dropped during shopping? What if the store attendant dropped it while sticking the shelves? What if it was purchased, opened, and then returned to the store? Even if the store has a policy of not putting open box items back on the shelf, there are people who will go to great lengths to make it look unopened.
All this stuff is possible, I don't think there practical risk to buying a used car seat is all that much higher. Besides, what if you drop it. Are you going to buy a new one, just to be sure it isn't damaged?
I’m about to sell our infant seat for less than 1/4th what we purchased it for. I feel fine knowing it’s been handled extremely carefully and still have 5 years left to “expire”
Here’s the thing...
I know most people are probably honest like me and their car seat was never in an accident, but I won’t buy a second hand car seat anyway because I’m paranoid I guess.
What kind of shitty salesman is that
Truth be told, there are plenty of secondhand car seats out there. For one thing, they get handed down from one kid to the next within a family. For another, relatives and neighbors share them.
It's like any secondhand item... something could always go wrong.
And yeah, you absolutely hand them down to younger kids. Throwing out old car seats is nuts and not something people actually do unless 1) they have more money than you know what to do with, or 2) the seat looks like it's in bad shape or reveals on inspection that it's damaged or deteriorating, or 3) you just don't know anyone who could use it.
Yes they do. Target alone is a counterexample over 500,000 strong.
Fear is a powerful motivator. My wife and I are constantly lamenting the trading on Americans’ obsession with child safety, but even we found this article allaying some lingering fear that there might be some unknown reason to stop using the seat we picked up off the side of the road.
An additional benefit: It raises them up so they can see out the window, which means... less puke.
If you scale up a toddler car seat, it looks a lot like the safety seats in race cars or fighter jets: the seat wraps around the outside edge of the body and upper legs; the head rest wraps around the sides of the head with padding; the restraint straps have a 5-point attachment system.
At this point I'd gladly pay $100 or more for some expert to just recommend a safe seat for our car. I already wasted much more than that on research in terms of opportunity cost.
(please excuse the rant)
That’s how I found our car seat. I was looking for safety and fit, but also what people seemed to like the best. Forums are great for stuff like this.
Isofix does not have to have a leg etc could be just bars holding the seat at place, thats its only benefit it keeps the object attached to isofix in place in case of a accident. It will not fly around the car as it is attached to it thus provides more safety.
At the end if the crash is huge then newtons laws apply a bigger mass will just run everything over, does not matter if it is secured or not you just can't beat a bigger mass.
Off something like Craigslist, I'd worry about it having being in an undisclosed car accident.
Same thing for bike helmets - after a serious shock, they should be replaced, even if there's not visible damage.
Also, when trying to decide whether a second-hand car seat is safe, you're multiplying the probability of a seat being damaged in an accident, by the probability that the damage will significantly reduce the safety of the seat, by the probability that the seat being sold was in an accident. I understand if a parent would rather just buy a new one and not worry about this. But I see this as being a near-zero risk.
edit: I see that some child car seats do use EPP foam, which could possibly get permanently compressed during a severe impact.
I would replace my kids seats after any accident with airbags or pretensioners firing.
We have two car seats with 9 year expirations. The older seat is almost 3 years old. I doubt it's going to make it past 5-6. My first kid has had diaper blowouts, vomiting episodes, messy eating episodes, potty training accidents, and more - all into the same seat. It's looking pretty grungy.
I'm pretty paranoid about following manufacturer instructions for cleaning, but I know plenty of parents that bleach and steam clean and generally don't follow instructions for car seat care.
Gently used seats that were well taken care of - those should absolutely be reused, and you don't have to get into developing nations to find someone that can use it. But not all seats, honestly - especially not with how much we as a society are using car seats nowadays. My almost-3 year old is still rear facing in a convertible seat that should last her at least another year.
And this from someone who just spent good money replacing the rock and roll bed in a campervan to improve seatbelt safety for the little one. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Now, maybe they were all being excessively cautious in the replacement, but...
But the environment matter a lot too. There ought to be crash test by government agencies comparing new and old car seats.
Similar trend with children carriages. Shifting from sturdy iron constructions towards light weight aluminum materials. Difference being iron construction lasts long good for the environment, aluminum one to two children buy and throw.
Knowing how corporations rule the USA, the moment a government agency will start doing this testing/comparison, the carseat manufacturers will start lobbying (or as we know it in the rest of the world: "bribing politicians to preserve and increase their profits"), and we will most likely not see any solid results.
Knowing Sweden and how they value life over $$$$, my money is with them instead of a shady "Carseat Media LLC". It looks like it's fearmongering "hey what is more important? $500 or the life of your child?"
The manufacturers want to limit their exposure to any one design. If this year's cost-saving design unexpectedly doesn't work, they want to budget and cut off liability.
And, as a parent, if the seat is poorly designed in a way that it ever harms my child, I want to be able to sue the manufacturer.
That seems a sufficient reason not to accept a used seat from someone you don't know. Another reason for concern that wasn't mentioned is needing to know if the product was recalled.
Upshot being there's likely no reason to throw away an older car seat. You probably still don't want to shop for one at a yard sale.
There are shock stickers shippers use to verify if shipments have exceeded certain shock thresholds; car seats with a similar feature would allow for a second hand market (as data shows car seats should be safe to use for 20-30 years, if they haven’t been exposed to stresses from an accident).
You just need enough customers to ask for it, or regulation.
Most car seats aren't really that complex, and when you take apart a car seat (eg to wash the cover) you can see all the "internal structure", and it would be very obvious if something was damaged in a crash.
Get a car seat from a moderate or severe accident, and cut it in half; you’ll be able to see the damage from the forces involved.
That’s not to say I think all seats should be summarily discarded after an expiration date because some people (like me) don’t garage their car. I’m saying there is some nuance to this choice.
Does it really matter if the material is still sturdy in a booster seat?
The updated booster however was like a car seat. The car's seat belts held the seat which in turn had a 5-point harness.
tell me, how many of you are riding with expired seats? u criminals!
The legislation requires some electronic alarm to prevent infants being locked in cars, but apparently vendors aren't up to speed and the law was brought in anyway,leaving everyone either breaking the law or not able to drive their children... .