Question Research about different crash types?

That's probably a lousy subject title, but I wasn't sure what to call this. I'm asking for a mom on another forum, she had a question about where to place her son who just reached the height limit for rear facing in his convertible and now has to be forward facing.

She says that her vehicle manual does not specify that a seat cannot be installed in the middle position (I don't know what vehicle she has), but now that her son is forward facing, she feels uncomfortable having him in the middle with nothing between him and the windshield. She asked if there is (direct quote) "any research on side crashes versus front end collisions and objects coming through the windshield?"

My gut feeling was that I've read many instances of other vehicles pushing into the car in side impact crashes and if I only had one child I would prefer him in the middle, and that I've not read many instances of objects coming through the windshield and hurting a child in the back seat (actually, not any that I can think of, though I'm sure it can happen). But that's an untrained lay person's gut instincts, and now something I'm wondering about.

Side-impacts are less common than frontals, but are also far more deadly. I know there are graphs and stuff out there, but I don't have them on my phone. I'm sure someone else will post it.

Objects flying through the windshield are typically freak occurrences and not something I would concern myself with in the least. When something like that does happen, it's usually the front-seat passengers who are injured/killed anyway. I, too, would be curious to see the statistics on people killed by being struck by objects flying through the windshield, but I imagine it's miniscule. Side-impacts are a much more real concern.

I'm not sure how much it helps, but I just checked the FARS database (national database of all fatalities involving motor vehicles). It's kind of complicated plus, like I said, I'm on my phone. It's also all coded by specific guidelines, so I can't just search for "something crashed through windshield."

However, I was able to search by "first harmful event," meaning that if there were a chain of crashes, etc., just whatever the initial thing was. The best category I could get was "thrown/fallen object."

In 2010, there were a total of two fatalities caused by thrown or falling objects--and even in those two cases, it sounds like the objects didn't actually fall INTO the car. It looks like the driver's swerved to avoid hitting them.

That's not to say there were no fatalities due to something coming through a windshield. Stuff gets misreported, or maybe there's some other category I haven't discovered yet. But that's the closest I could get so far.

ETA: there were actually 18 collisions that fell under that category, not 2. I inadvertently had another limiting factor in there.

Thank you! I tried to respond before and couldn't - apparently I need to type 2 lines before the "send" button activates?

Is the database public, or restricted access? That sounds like interesting (depressing maybe, but interesting) reading.

thekatie said:

Thank you! I tried to respond before and couldn't - apparently I need to type 2 lines before the "send" button activates?

Click to expand...

It's a bug in the iOS app. You can hit return after your first line and the send button will enable.

--Sent from my iPhone using Car-Seat.Org

My mom is always freaked about people sitting in the middle seat of the back too - she worried about things coming through the windshield and kids flying out the windshield because there is no seat in front of them to stop their flight. I think both of those fears are from working in the ER many years ago, she saw injuries from a log that fell off a logging truck and came through the windshield. She also saw lots of kids who were not seatbelted or restrained properly fly forward in car crashes. I think that front passengers are way more at risk of objects in the windshield and a properly restrained kid in the center back is not going to fly through the front. Side impact crashes would be much more of my concern - with only 1 child, center is definitely safest!

According to a study published in Pediatrics in 2008, the center position in the backseat is associated with a 43% lower risk of injury than the rear outboard seats for children 0 to 3:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/121/5/e1342.full.pdf

So while there may be some one-in-a-million chance of something coming through the windshield at just the right angle, the reality is that "plain vanilla" crashes are much more common and that children are safer in the center.

At the same time, the outboard seats are still safe enough -- we use them for our own children, and in cases where you have more than one child, there's often no other choice.

Also, someone asked about the FARS database -- yes, it is freely available online, though it can be hard to work with. You can generally only search one year at a time and it uses an esoteric coding system for crash types, etc.:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx