Lil’ Neville and Neville Baby are in car seats. Periodically, as they grow, we have to adjust the harness straps in their car seats. This is a pain to do. We also have to keep the straps tight enough that strapping them in can be challenging. Why can’t car seats have retractable belts, like adult seat belts? That would solve both of those problems, and it seems to work well enough for adult seat belts.
Retractable belts allow for movement until the brakes are applied; it lets the adults move around. Do you want your childs seats to be moving around until the brakes are applied.
It would add to the weight and cost of the seats. It would also add an essentially needless complication to their design, having to have compact but reliable seat belt retraction reels. As Si Amigo states above these reels are designed to normally allow some belt slack but to lock when decelerating, not something you want for a child. You can make reels that are a ‘one-way’ spring-loaded ratcheting design that only get tighter as the slack is taken up (early 70s seat belts were like this) but these would be even worse for little kids (think strangulation). All this would increase their potential for physical failure and/or improper usage by consumers, which would result in deaths/injuries (and bazillion dollar lawsuits).
It wouldn’t get them tight enough, I’m sure. You know how tight you have to get those damned things. Plus, I’m sure it would be much safer for adults not to move around, but adults won’t tolerate it.
I feel ya… it is a pain to strap unruly children into their car seats.
But I suspect that the general idiocy among most parents out there when it comes to carseats would indicate against doing anything that could be more complicated or any more prone to failure. People are already shockingly stupid about how to put them on- how often do you see children in car seats with slack straps, or with the chest-clip somewhere around their belly button, or something like that? All the time, unfortunately.
Plus, there’s the liability angle; what car seat manufacturer wants to be sued for little Jenny being flung out of the car seat because the auto-retractor didn’t retract fully, or because the parent was dumb enough to let the 2 year old do it themselves and they only got one arm under the strap?
Hello folk.
Presenting the child Car Cage. No need to wrestle with lose straps ever again. Weld Car Cage to the frame, shoehorn the little tyke in and add water. It’s that easy. But wait, there’s more…
But seat belts would have the same mechanical and liability issues that retractable car seat straps would. And they might help solve the problem of car seat straps not being adjusted properly. You’d have a lot fewer slack straps, for example.
Parents who have had experience with the difficulty of adjusting straps and getting kids into car seats might be willing to pay more for a seat that made those things easier. Car seats come at all different prices- a quick Google search turned some up that cost several times what I paid for mine.
The wee ones would be in constant Escape Mode.
If you are a large car components manufacturer you have the engineering legal and financial backup to design, test, and insure your product. If you are the manufacturer of a baby seat you are in a very different league. You make what is industry accepted, and what the courts have not found issue with.
The sad problem is that unless there was a legal push to require such belts, no manufacturer would go near the product as the risks would be too great. They probably would find it hard to get liability insurance at almost any price.
If a misfitted manual belt injures a child you can probably blame the parent for misfitting it. If any sort of automatic reel injured a child you can say hello to product liability hell. Even if the automatic design is better for the afore mentioned reasons.
My child seats have all had retractable straps. They’re not automatic like a regular adult shoulder belt but there is a release button between baby E’s knees which allows the shoulder straps to be loosened. It makes getting him out and in a lot easier and once he’s in there is a strap to pull which tightens the shoulder straps back up. It takes two hands to loosen and one hand to tighten. I thought they were pretty standard, and in my many years of baby wrangling I’ve never bought a seat without them.
The belts can’t be like adult belts so as to ensure the infant/toddler is locked in tight, can’t get out.
I had a seat for my children which did allow simple adjustment of the straps, including spring retraction.
When you are first grabbing the straps, you could press the button and extend the straps … And when its all in place, you could press the button and the belts would retract to just right .
I myself never did let the straps like that, out except he wasn’t fitting in, but you could do that every time if that made it easier for you.
This is my experience, too.
Our car seat had the release-button mechanism to loosen the straps, but it had three shoulder attachment points. IIRC you’re not supposed to have the shoulder attachment point below the shoulder. So as my daughter grew, there were three sessions of swearing, sweating, and perusing a crappy manual–twice to raise the shoulder attachments, and once to convert it to a booster seat.
What brand is this seat? Echoing some of the other posters, I’ve never seen a car seat without retractable belts.
Our seats’ belts are tightened manually, via a pull-strap near the kid’s knees (instead of automatically, like the car’s seat belts), but we never experience the problem you seem to be describing. We fully loosen the belts every time we remove a kid, and re-tighten with the pull-strap when we put him/her back in. The only periodic adjustment for growth is changing the height at which the shoulder straps emerge from the seat back.
Maybe she’s talking about the three times in a child’s life you have to move the shoulder points? (They’re below the shoulders while rear facing and above them when front facing.)
And she’s obviously not saying her belts don’t move, she’s saying she wishes they did it automatically so there wasn’t all the manual loosening and tightening. Which is, agreed, a pain in the ass especially now that I’ve been getting some arthritis in my hands.
If we’re redesigning the seat as we go, I’d like to consider a ratchet strap type of setup, just a little flush mounted lever that takes up the slack, with a adult strength required release button on the underside…
although, now i have a look around, there seem to be a few patent docs out there for “Car seat with integrated ratchet”
:smack:
We had a minivan with built-in child seats. The way the built-in harness worked, it would in fact extend as far as you needed it to get the child in - then when you latched it, it locked and would not extend any more. We actually had to have a certain amount of upper body strength to get it pulled out enough to fasten in the kid, without damaging him.
Something like that would seem to be what the OP is asking for. It worked pretty well, actually - but I can see it would in fact add weight to the standard moveable car seat (not that those are light weight, but still…).
I was glad when they finally invented the anchor straps with the push button release instead of the hook you bend in with your hand which were such a pain in the ass to hook and unhook. I’ve seen parents who don’t even bother to hook them, only using the seatbelt instead and their kids car seats were sliding every time they made a turn, poor kids.
You can have a totally safe and tight install with seat belts, you just have to do it right.