> As recently as October 2018, Target’s trade-in website claimed, “Used car seats shouldn’t be sold or given away, since they expire every six years and regulations change constantly.”
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.
>Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished.
A university I worked for had a partnership with a nearby inner city elementary school. University employees did a lot of volunteer work for the elementary school, everything from weekend landscaping to weekday reading for storytime. When we upgraded a lab full of computers, we donated the older computers to the elementary school. Reinstalled the OS and productivity software, set up the network, and did all the work on physical placement, even cleaned the storage room being turned into a computer lab. These weren't obsolete machines, they just weren't cutting edge.
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.
The company I'm working for is in the food industry. We used to give away overproduction and returns (returned for "print on the packaging is not 100% on point" nothing wrong with the goods) to local kindergartens and schools and clubs and whoever asked for free.
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.
Yeah but did you ever read the chapter of Freakonomics about car seats? Car seats improve children's chance of injury over every case except the one where kids sit in the back seat with an old fashioned seat belt on. Compared to that, car seats perform about the same. (Note: I get that an infant can't use a regular seat belt.)
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.
That book should never have been published with that chapter. The authors allegedly use boosters and car seats for their own kids, even after writing that chapter - let that sink in for a while...
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.
> The authors allegedly use boosters and car seats for their own kids, even after writing that chapter - let that sink in for a while...
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.
I do not dispute that 5 point harnesses are safer, but have you ever been strapped in one? You're more or less unable to move and are just completely fixated. At some point we should think about the effect of this, as it would likely lead to less children being strapped in.
Also, its not like they are saying child seats are ineffective. They are just saying the effects are from many things. Look, I read that and drove my kids around in car seats.
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
I'm 100% certain that it has lead people to take their children out of car seats as soon as they legally could, instead of letting them sit in it until they grew out of it.
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.
For families with 3 children, the child car seat requirement generally pushes them into a minivan because you can't install car seats 3 to a row, so you need an extra row. And then you still max out at 1 friend instead of 3, because even a minivan won't seat more than 4 child car seats.
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.
I have 3 children and a minivan. We bought the minivan not strictly because 3 carseats won't fit across the 2nd row of most reasonably large cars (there's a niche market for narrow carseats, see Diono brand) but because:
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 operate
I would go with lack of parental leave, decreasing income security, stagnating wages, student loan debt, enormous healthcare expenses, and need for dual income households as well as being in school for longer periods of time to secure good jobs over car sizes and prices.
Not to mention minivans exist and aren’t that expensive compared to cars.
> Hahahaha. That would never happen. The optics would be horrible, both domestically and internationally. Such a good deed could never go unpunished.
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.
Places that forbid this tend to do so because it's the only way to cure rampant theft.
"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.
Cannibalising you're own sales is an issue too - high street bakeries in UK won't sell off for cheaper at the end of the day, they throw it out; otherwise they're lose full price sales because poor people would come and buy the goods at the end of the day.
A lot of bakeries around here (The Netherlands) now use TooGoodTooGo to offload stuff at the end of the day. I think it cannibalizes less on normal sales as you can't choose what you get and you have to order your "magic box" a day in advance.
I personally love the concept and use it a lot at both supermarkets and bakeries.
If it is past the expiration date they don't have to recall it at all. Saves a lot of money when nearly every car seat ever made was recalled at some point (or so it seems - as a parent every carseat I've ever bought has been recalled at some time within 5 years).
What bothers me more about "expiry" of car seats is that this logic isn't applied to other toys.
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.
Going beyond the obvious motive of child car seat manufacturers wanting to undermine the second-hand market, I expect design flaws could also play a part.
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.
> But the drugs aren't actually expired, and they're certainly not used
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
> they often retain their potency for many years after the supposed expiration date
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
As soon as you have kids you recognize a pattern: Every car seat, stroller, high chair, and crib gets recalled. Every single one. The companies want to eliminate the secondary market for these products and they are damn good at it using lawyers. This is massive bullshit and it contributes to a massive waste stream. It is a big reason why having a family is so damned un-affordable. What if cars expired?
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.
Huge kudos to the author for taking the time to investigate this issue. Interestingly in the book Freakeconomics from 2005 they did an analysis on car seats and found that after 2 years of age they don't make much of a difference. During their study the came across the same type of behavior from child seat manufacturers - ignoring requests for information.
The Freakonomics guys are notorious for using shoddy research, jumping to bad conclusions, and generally publishing provocative conclusions just for the sake of provocativeness that don't hold up to even a whiff of debunking. I rolled my eyeballs through the entire book.
That’s a terrible talk! In particular, why on earth is the car seat moving forwards in the crash test? Most car seats I’ve seen are essentially bolted to the rest of the seat. Is this a Europe / USA thing?
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.
> It’s common for car seats to be attached to a seat belt which adds some play.
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.
The 2 point LATCH system is attached below not behind the car seat’s center of gravity, so under heavy acceleration it depresses the car’s seat cushion and rotates forward then bounces up and back. Minimizing this is the reasoning behind the 3rd attachment point.
In the comments of the article I posted there is some discussion about proper seat installation. I thought this commenter summed it pretty well:
"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.
> 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.
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.
This is false, the data was selectively biased. Stop spreading misinformation. The "data" you talk about says that seat belts are about as effective as car seats at preventing death, which is true. However the data that is ignored in that study is that they are far better at preventing severe injuries to children. Please look into what you say when people believing your bullshit could severely injure a young child.
The hypothesis I suggested was specifically in response to that data. With improperly installed car seats resulting in preventable deaths, and properly installed car seats resulting in reduced injuries.
Otherwise it’s difficult for something to meaningfully reduce injuries without also preventing deaths. Unless you have a better explanation?
usually there's a seat belt locking mechanism or the car seat itself has lockoffs to lock the belt in place. the belt isn't freely retracting and extending.
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.
OK but alternately it seems clear that a lot of car seat marketing is aimed at the paranoia of new parents. (Speaking as a patent btw). Do you worry your seat belts have expired? Do you worry your air bags have expired? Do you ask an EMT / Fireman to adjust your adult seat belt?
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.
There’s also only so much you can realistically do to keep you and/or a child safe in a car accident. Cars are just dangerous, and although safety has improved, slamming into anything at 60+ mi/h can only be made so safe. Combine a need for control with the anxiety of being a parent, and it’s no wonder car seat marketing works so well. After a certain point, though, some things are out of your control, and people should take solace in realizing that they can only realistically do so much to keep their kids safe. (This applies to everything outside of your country, by the way.)
It was suggested to us (can't remember where from) that a second hand car seat might have been dropped or damaged in some un-noticable way and so would not be as strong as it needed to be. So it wasn't so much about expiration dates as it was about knowing what had happened to that particular seat. I was kindof unconvinced by the idea of unnoticable damage* but then its your kids so you shrug and fork out for a new seat.
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)
This is a thing with motorcycle helmets. If you get in a crash or you drop it with some weight inside, you need to replace it. That's why nobody buys secondhand helmets. Apparently the structure of the foam can be broken and will not work as well in another impact.
Having taken the pads out of my helmet to clean them on occasion and seeing the colour of the water afterwards. The crash worthiness of a used motorcycle helmet would be the least of my concerns.
So, just like if it's banged unloading it at the shop (ie store), or dropped by a member of sales staff?
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)?
You mean banged around the foam lined cushioned box it lives in? How about an analogy:
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.
Sure, but if your car seat is being subject to the kind of force where any cracks that are not immediately obvious are a problem you're probably dead and the kid is too.
Sssh, you can't argument with some logic here, you need to think about your kids first and foremost! And if you don't shelve out top dollars for anything/everything for them, then you are of course a bad parent and despicable human being.
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.
One should distinguish between at least two things here, and I'm not totally sure about the terminology. There's a thing called a "booster seat", I think, which doesn't contain any expanded polystyrene and is not likely to be damaged invisibly, in my opinion, nor likely to be particularly dangerous if damaged: it's basically just a convenient replacement for sitting on a few telephone directories or something like that. And yet these things cannot be donated to a charity shop. I think for some places the rule is very simple: if it has a BSI Kite Mark they won't take it.
A booster seat is designed to stop a child slipping under the seat belt that crosses their legs. It's not just raising the child up.
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?
This was the same thing we got. Then we learned the seatbelt performs about the same as a forward facing car seat and started to doubt the marketing a little more.
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.
This is indeed true for the majority of bicycle helmets. They are commonly referred to as "single impact" helmets. Unlike, for example a football or hockey helmet.
My wife crashed her bike once. It was a pretty nasty crash. Low speed, but she got her wheel in a grate and went down right on her head. As she was relatively uninjured (a few stiches) I decided to go an buy the same kind of helmet again. The salesperson said, "Let me see the old helmet. Are you sure it needs to be replaced? Sometimes they are fine." I gave him both halves ;-)
I've conveniently blotted the details out of my memory, but nowadays you have to go through multiple car seats per kid, because there are different types for different age groups. Multiply by how many kids you have. Multiply by how many cars you have in your family.
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.
They're also supposed to be in them until they're 10 or so, these days. You're likely to go through 3-4 seats per kid—infant (often also a carrier), toddler, then either a larger car seat and later a booster or a convertible booster that can do both.
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.
>Throwing out old car seats is nuts and not something people actually do
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.
The counterexample needs a huge caveat. Outside of one-off registry discounts and occasional manufacturer end-of year/model/design sales, the Target trade-in deal is one of the best deals you can get on baby/child gear. Parents in my local groups will hold on to seats from accidents and more, just to get or give away these 20% coupons.
I suspect most second hand car seats are immediately traded in. If you watch the market most second hard car seats are sold at the time of the target sale.
Even adults would be safer in a car seat like the ones kids sit in, if anyone would be willing to use one.
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.
An almost perfect racket, the product has a low intrinsic cost and a long life - how can we make them obsolete? Kid based FUD is sown all over their web pages and package inserts, and we all love kids - right?
I'm currently buying a new seat for our kid (as she's outgrowing the second-hand one we had before). Even with ISOFIX and i-Size standards in the EU, it's an ordeal. The space is ridiculously overcrowded (just how many variants of a car seat can one make?!), seats themselves are near-impossible to compare against each other, and every site keeps reminding you that your kid's life hangs on your purchase. And then there's car compatibility issue - we just discovered that even though our Xsara Picasso has ISOFIX mount points, it doesn't accept the support leg (because of floor-level storage compartments) and seemingly doesn't have a top tether mounting point either. One has to wonder why they even bothered to add the ISOFIX mounts in the first place.
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.
just take the science out of it, carseat for a kid does nothing more than to rise them to suitable seatbelt height or makes the seatbelt usable for really young kids.
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.
Are the forces in an accident strong enough to damage an engineered car seat? It's already protected by crumple zones, and I'd expect the car seat to be more robust than the occupant.
But is that based on research performed, or just a "better safe than sorry" statement? Have they (or anyone) ever seen a seat fail prematurely or perform worse due to being involved in multiple accidents? That page doesn't have any more information other than that statement. I'm having a difficult time imagining what parts of a car seat would be damaged during a crash (where the seat itself is not impacted). One exception is if car seats are designed to deform, crush, etc. to absorb energy, like a bike helmet is. But I've never seen anything like that.
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.
Evenflo has a car seat that is designed to last 10 years. This seems pretty reasonable, after this point I assume you'd want access to the latest technology and safety standards, and plastics do age some over time.
This doesn't take into account seat maintenance and daily use, it feels like.
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.
Yeah, so I was never really sure what a new car seat would gain us in our second hand car...
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.
Age may or may not be a problem, but several of the people I know that have sold car seats have done so specifically because they were replacing them after they were in a vehicle collision. (Which probably also involves insurance fraud, since insurers will pay for that but require—easily faked—evidence that the seat has been rendered unsaleable, e.g., photo of it with the straps cut.)
Now, maybe they were all being excessively cautious in the replacement, but...
I recently sold a car seat just to learn about the second hand age of cars seats matter.
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.
> There ought to be crash test by government agencies comparing new and old car seats
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?"
Consumer Reports does crash tests -- well simulated crash tests, they've got a rig that accelerates the seat to see how a dummy of a child moves during crash-like conditions.
This is about minimizing litigation risk, from the manufacturer side and the parent side.
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.
> so long as a seat hasn’t been in a crash or otherwise doesn’t exhibit any damage
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.
Internal structure damage reducing effectiveness in future impacts.
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.
What kind of "internal structure damage" would that be?
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.
Yeah, I'd really love to see pictures of a car seat that has enough "internal damage" to be dangerous, without that damage being visible when you take the cover off.
Having used a second hand booster seat for my daughter, I can testify sun damage is a real thing. I could not pass it on in good conscience. And we replaced it with a more modern and much sturdier version.
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.
They seem to not sell used baby gates at second hand baby stores either. id guess for a similar reason and that being that they don't want to claim liability in asserting the item was in original working order.
Apparently, as the moment, about 99% of people in Italy with car seats are, due to some recently-introduced legislation.
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... .
EPP (extruded polypropylene) and EPS (extruded polystyrene) are not exposed to the sunlight in car seat's construction. Also, if those break down it will be surface-first decomposition and very visible/noticeable.
Windshields usually filter UV light, but the other car windows usually don't. In addition a large number of infant car seats consist of a base unit which always remains fastened in the car and a removeable unit which holds the infant. The removeable unit often can also fit into a stroller unit. When used in the stroller the EPP and EPS have a even greater chance of being exposed to UV light.
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.