Question Car seat for old hobby car

2blackdogs · Apr 6, 2019

My husband has an old 1983 Toyota land cruiser hobby car. My 3 year really wants to go for rides in it to town or daycare (all back country roads). The car is old, top-heavy, doesn't have a roll bar, and the car seat would need to be in the front seat. If money were no object, is there a car seat that could make this situation safe? I would love to support my son and husband having this hobby together from a young age, but not at the risk of my son's safety.

katymyers · Apr 7, 2019

I don’t really think that there’s any car seat that would make that situation safe. If this was your family’s primary vehicle and truly the best that you had, we could certainly make suggestions for your son to be as safe as possible in a far less than ideal situation but that isn’t the case here. I have to say too, as someone who lives in a very rural state, most of the really severe accidents I see on the news are on back country roads. I also know from having friends who are county sheriffs and state troopers that they actually see more accidents per capita on these roads. I think there’s a combination of factors at play there but from what I can tell, they’re not as safe as people perceive them to be and I personally avoid them as much as possible when commuting to work. Ultimately it is your choice whether or not to allow your son to ride in that vehicle and it’s definitely something that you and your husband would have to work out together but if it were me, I wouldn’t be okay with it.

jjordan · Apr 7, 2019

Safety is a matter of degrees. Properly using a car seat is safer than not. A new car with tons of safety features is safer than an older car without. Probably in most cases a larger car is safer than a smaller car (assuming they have comparable safety features and ratings). And the list goes on.

So asking if there is a way to make it "safe" is not really the right question to ask, because really, what does that mean? We can't give you statistics about the risks of your child riding in that particular vehicle, much less compare those to statistics in another vehicle or situation.

We do know that rear facing in a non-outgrown seat is safer than forward facing as long as the seat is not in front of an active frontal airbag. If the vehicle does not have frontal airbags then that would be the safest option - using a high-capacity rear facing seat and using it correctly every time.

If the vehicle has frontal airbags then the best you can do is move the front seat as far from the dashboard as possible, and then get a forward-facing harnessed seat with low head excursion numbers and use it correctly 100% of the time.