[HN Gopher] Odd and unsafe baby car seats from the past
___________________________________________________________________
Odd and unsafe baby car seats from the past
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 93 points
Date : 2023-08-23 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Pre 70s/80s cars were really total deathtraps, it's pretty
| amazing how far we've come.
|
| https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
| wedn3sday wrote:
| All modern cars are death traps.
| afavour wrote:
| All modern cars are deadly, just the deadliness is projected
| outwards.
|
| Don't get me wrong, increased car safety is a good thing but
| people can drive like maniacs with a pretty good assurance
| they're not going to be seriously injured even if they get in
| a crash. So they do. Which is bad news is you're a pedestrian
| or a cyclist.
| bluGill wrote:
| They drove the same (or likely worse!) in 1960 when cars
| went just as fast as today, but they didn't have either the
| drivers training or the safety features of a modern car.
| mech765 wrote:
| Aren't bicycles more deadly per passenger mile?
| connicpu wrote:
| In terms of being killed by other vehicles on the road yes
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Which is why they don't belong on the road with cars.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| I too agree with the banning of cars from areas where
| pedestrians and cyclists are likely to be, for example,
| all city centres and residential areas.
| eru wrote:
| You don't need to go quite so far. Dutch levels of
| separation are probably enough.
| connicpu wrote:
| The roads belonged to pedestrians, horses, and bicycles a
| long time before the car infestation took over
| parineum wrote:
| I can't believe you're in favor of banning cars, horses
| and bicycles from the road.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Modern cars are very safe for the occupants compared to all
| previous iterations. It's the people by foot or bike you
| crash those cars into that are in a bad place.
| eru wrote:
| Though different cars differ. SUVs are particularly bad for
| pedestrians and cyclists.
| genter wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck
| [deleted]
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Now we have dozens of car seats designed by engineers and
| thoroughly crash-tested to create car seats that get thrown away
| (or are supposed to be) after any impact event. Makes me feel
| like we are much richer than we used to be.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Same for helmets. It less so it's purposely designed so people
| will keep buying them but more so that something has to absorb
| the impact so the kid doesn't. Mechanical deformation turns out
| to be the most effective and safest but deformation is also a
| one way street hence why you need to change it after an impact.
| That being said, how often are you getting into accidents?!
| midasuni wrote:
| Given how rare an impact event is that's quite reasonable -
| I've had car seats for 11 years now, from rear facing carrier
| to just a small booster (Italy requires a child to be 150cm to
| travel without a car seat)
|
| I've disposed of them as the youngest child outgrows them, but
| they've never been in an impact.
| isk517 wrote:
| It's definitely a rip off. I'm working on a new type of child
| car seat that I believe will take the market by storm.
| Guaranteed to be reusable after every crash. My plan to achieve
| this is by design the seat so that the force of the impact is
| funneled directly into the child, protecting the car seat from
| any damage.
| ajford wrote:
| Yeah, that's because they're designed to absorb the damage into
| internal stress and deformation to dissipate the force of the
| crash.
|
| That force and momentum has to go somewhere and it's better to
| absorb it into the car seat and consider it a consumable than
| to transmit that force into the child it's meant to protect.
| The same thing applies for helmets. A motorcycle helmet is a
| consumable item and should be discarded after a crash as the
| internal foam structure will be deformed and could fail to
| properly absorb the impact forces in a subsequent crash.
| blincoln wrote:
| Imagine how much more expensive a car seat designed to be fully
| reusable after a collision would be, then consider how often
| most people are involved in serious collisions.
|
| I'm in my 40s, and I've been a passenger in one collision that
| required a tow truck, something like 20 years ago. Most people
| I've talked to have similar experiences in terms of frequency
| of serious collisions.
|
| It's less expensive overall to do it this way.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Not to be That Guy, but all car seats are unsafe since they're in
| cars. Im shocked on a daily basis how stupid and short sighted
| our car culture is, everyone has to behave perfectly all the
| time, and the consequences are death for you and random
| strangers. Any random stranger can sneeze at any time and kill
| your whole family.
| willio58 wrote:
| > Any random stranger can sneeze at any time and kill your
| whole family.
|
| So true. I live right near a stroad and a crosswalk on that
| stroad and about once a week I hear brakes being slammed on
| because people aren't paying attention and it's a high-traffic
| area for walkers (some of which are children) since the rest of
| the neighborhood is actually quite walkable. I've live in this
| place 1 year and now witnessed 4 accidents, luckily none of
| them killing anyone yet but it's just a matter of time.
|
| I've also been traveling a lot recently and experiencing cities
| (even American ones) that value good public transportation with
| metros (and even trains in the Northeast) and it's a breath of
| fresh air. Then I come back to where I live and the only way to
| describe it is I'm watching these huge machines, piloted by and
| only transporting 1 person in most cases, barreling around my
| local area just narrowly missing each other at high speeds.
| Every pilot is just assuming every other pilot had enough
| coffee that day, isn't massively distracted by any number of
| things, doesn't have road rage, isn't trying to show off their
| loud, polluting, and dangerous machine, etc. No wonder kids
| increasingly stay inside and get depressed. Previous
| generations literally built car and parking lot hellscapes and
| expect people to still enjoy life outside the home.
| eru wrote:
| > Not to be That Guy, but all car seats are unsafe since
| they're in cars.
|
| Safety is a spectrum, not a binary.
| ChoHag wrote:
| I can't lie, I like the look of that one that hangs them out the
| side window.
|
| Can we get them for planes?
| bombcar wrote:
| One thing to realize about these photos - they're _still_ a vast
| improvement over a child literally rolling around on the floor
| (where they could get entangled with the pedals or who knows what
| else).
| drewg123 wrote:
| I was a baby in the early 70s, and I'm not even sure I ever had
| anything resembling a car seat. I remember walking around in
| the back seat area of my grandmother's giant Ford sedan in the
| early 1970s.
|
| I also remember sitting on the rear "luggage shelf" of my mom's
| Triumph TR6 2-seat sports car. I loved that, because my head
| was high enough that I could see the road ahead. I can only
| imagine how I would have gone flying and likely been impaled on
| the gear shift if there had been an accident...
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| It was much later than that, I remember sleeping on the back
| shelf of my parent's little 240D Benz on long road trips.
|
| Of course, people still do things like sleep on the floor of
| a minivan, but it's not quite as _common_ now.
| CRConrad wrote:
| For a bit of perspective , it's kind of funny to see the
| 240D called a "little" car. A while back, after the
| introduction of the 190 (predecessor of the C-class), the
| 240 and its ilk (the successors of which are now
| collectively known as the E-class) were the definition of a
| mid-size Mercedes - but even before that, they were
| generally accepted all over the world, _except_ for North
| America, as _large_ cars.
| justrealist wrote:
| I'm not convinced that's true. In a crash, the bar is going to
| cause a lot of internal damage and whiplash (if it contains
| them at all)... I mean it might be true, but I really doubt it
| was tested formally.
| flir wrote:
| It's ok, babies fold. I'm sure I've read that somewhere.
| kuhsaft wrote:
| I think OP means that it's an improvement in crash prevention
| not crash safety.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. You could go your entire life without being
| involved in a crash, but if a child is rolling around in
| the car, you will probably be involved in at least
| annoyance quite quickly.
| jwestbury wrote:
| I'm not _entirely_ convinced that your baby hanging outside the
| car is an improvement over your baby just laying on the seat.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think that one was a "baby hangs inside the window when
| driving, but you can hang them outside when parked at a
| picnic".
|
| But maybe not! Maybe life was much more exciting (and bug
| filled) for babies back then.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I feel like the _metal frame_ external car seat would get
| hot as hell in the baking sun when taking your baby for a
| picnic.
| eru wrote:
| Park in the shade?
| CRConrad wrote:
| Either way, at least Baby wouldn't suffocate in the heat,
| as they do nowadays.
| eweise wrote:
| I don't think I wore a seatbelt until my teenage years. We
| mainly rode in the back of the stationwagon where there was
| enough room to play games.
|
| I also remember riding in truck beds was a normal thing.
| [deleted]
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Some may provide a little extra safety. Some seem to make
| things worse. A hammock for safety? LOL.
| brazzy wrote:
| If that hammock and it's attachment are strong enough, it's
| probably the safest of all the options shown in the article.
| jakemoshenko wrote:
| Pros: It will automatically orient to either a frontal or
| rear collision and has tons of contact area with the body. If
| it's made of even a slightly stretchy material it would also
| spread the force out over some period of time.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wish more vehicles had more rear-facing seats. Can't get
| used to it without experiencing it throughout life.
|
| Seems like only bi-directional train cars have them, or
| trams that rarely slow down rapidly.
| seszett wrote:
| Metros have them, and in my experience the rear-facing
| seats are more comfortable, as metros decelerate much
| faster than they accelerate (or at least in Lille, I
| didn't notice it as much in three other metros I took).
| Someone wrote:
| Also, driver safety wasn't a thing, either. If a car came to a
| rapid stop, those kids would have been flying through the front
| window, but chances are the driver would be impaled on the
| steering column (the steering wheel would easily break of, but
| that column would be rigidly connected to the front axle), the
| engine block might be pushed through the car into the back
| seats, maiming any legs it encountered, etc.
|
| Cars were extremely dangerous at the time and could kill their
| passengers in collisions even at low speeds.
|
| Ralph Nader had a point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_a
| t_Any_Speed:_The_Desig...)
| cogman10 wrote:
| > If a car came to a rapid stop, those kids would have been
| flying through the front window
|
| That's how my sister broke her arm and what got my entire
| family on the "buckle up every time" train.
|
| Fortunately, she was in the backseat of a van so she wasn't
| ejected from the vehicle. But it was a real wake up call.
| (This happened back in the 90s).
| jvm___ wrote:
| The glass broke like picture frame glass, all sharp-edged and
| spiky. Safety glass was invented as it breaks into tiny
| shards that are unlikely to cause major damage.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I read Roald Dahl's autobiography when I was young (young
| enough to be reading his other children's books) and
| remember his description of the car accident in 1925, when
| he was 9:
|
| > The driver was to be that twelve-years-older-than-me
| half-sister ... She had received two full half-hour lessons
| in driving from the man who delivered the car, and in that
| enlightened year of 1925 this was considered quite
| sufficient.
|
| > ...
|
| > Spurred on by our shouts and taunts, the ancient sister
| began to increase the speed. The engine roared and the body
| vibrated. The driver was clutching the steering-wheel as
| though it were the hair of a drowning man, and we all
| watched the speedometer needle creeping up to twenty, then
| twenty-five, then thirty. We were probably doing about
| thirty-five miles an hour when we came suddenly to a
| sharpish bend in the road. The ancient sister, never having
| been faced with a situation like this before, shouted
| 'Help!' and slammed on the brakes and swung the wheel
| wildly round. The rear wheels locked and went into a fierce
| sideways skid, and then, with a marvellous crunch of
| mudguards and metal, we went crashing into the hedge. The
| front passengers all shot through the front windscreen and
| the back passengers all shot through the back windscreen.
| Glass (there was no Triplex then) flew in all directions
| and so did we. My brother and one sister landed on the
| bonnet of the car, someone else was catapulted out on to
| the road and at least one small sister landed in the middle
| of the hawthorn hedge. But miraculously nobody was hurt
| very much except me. My nose had been cut almost clean off
| my face as I went through the rear windscreen and now it
| was hanging on only by a single small thread of skin. My
| mother disentangled herself from the scrimmage and grabbed
| a handkerchief from her purse. She clapped the dangling
| nose back into place fast and held it there.
|
| -- Roald Dahl, _Boy_ (1984)
| huehehue wrote:
| This story is dumb luck, and not an anti-seatbelt sentiment
| in any way: my grandmother was in a collision severe enough
| to send her flying through the front windshield and into the
| ditch, and the shape of the car(s) afterwards suggested that
| if she _weren 't_ tossed from the car she would have been
| crushed to pieces.
|
| Things are different today, but interesting to think that the
| structural integrity on these old machines was so poor that
| you'd rather get hurled from the car in an accident.
| connicpu wrote:
| Yeah, it's crazy to think there was a time when cars put
| little to no engineering into passenger safety. A modern
| car is designed with room for the engine bay to be crushed
| to absorb some of the impact while all of the rigidity is
| put into the cage surrounding the passenger compartment
| eru wrote:
| At least that's the case for normal cars. SUVs have some
| weird regulatory loopholes around them (in the US) that
| negate these good ideas.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Decent manufacturers still use best safety practices even
| when not required to. Volvo and Mercedes invented most of
| the modern safety tech in the 70s and 80s and use it on
| all models, most other higher end cars do as well
| nowadays.
|
| If your car company only makes your car as safe as
| legally required, is that what you want to trust your
| family with?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sure, but try to import a euro-spec Volvo or Mercedes
| into USA or Canada and the safety authorities will treat
| you like you're pointing a gun at them.
| CRConrad wrote:
| The body of the car is identical. It would make no
| commercial sense to build the same vehicle with a rigid
| passenger cell surrounded by crumple zones for some
| markets, and in some other fashion for others. Any spec
| differences are equipment, peripherals, and engines - so
| performance, fuel economy, and exhaust cleanliness may
| differ, but not passive safety.
|
| ETA: Also, many of those Euro-standard "European" cars
| are built in the USA and exported to their "home"
| markets.
| paul_funyun wrote:
| Sure, the legal requirements are more than sufficient
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| That's a personal decision of course, but the most
| dangerous cars have real world death rates over 200x that
| of the safest designs, and they are all legal[1]. Driving
| is incredibly dangerous on average, yet the risk can be
| almost entirely mitigated by choosing the right vehicle.
| I find it shocking how much difference there is.
|
| [1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/the-deadliest-and-least-
| deadly-...
| dancek wrote:
| That's an understatement. According to that data, the
| most dangerous cars are infinitely more dangerous than
| the safest cars (205 driver deaths per million registered
| vehicle years vs. 0). Even more interestingly, the fifth
| safest car is infinitely more dangerous than the safest
| four cars (2 vs 0).
|
| Also note that this is the _driver_ death rate. The death
| rates for other people are vastly different.
|
| You shouldn't jump to conclusions from the data, either.
| A Dodge Challenger (3rd most driver deaths) is probably
| not unsafe per se, it just attracts people that want to
| take unnecessary risks.
|
| Driving is quite safe on average. In my home country
| there's 5.1 deaths per a billion vehicle kilometers.
| That's about one death every 2.5 million hours of driving
| at highway speed. Many other things carry a greater risk
| of death.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Traffic accidents are still the leading cause of death in
| older children and young adults... as a parent, it is by
| far the most important safety factor I have any control
| over.
|
| That is a good point about confounding factors based on
| who buys these cars, but overall it is pretty clear that
| most of the safest vehicles are larger cars and mid-sized
| SUVs from the higher end Japanese and European companies.
| They are all vehicles that are both heavy _and_ have car
| like safety features.
| nradov wrote:
| There are some SUVs such as the Nissan Pathfinder and BMW
| X3 with a driver death rate of _zero_.
|
| https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-
| and-...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That was an argument people made when seatbelts first
| became mandatory. They thought that without a seatbelt they
| would be "thrown clear" in an accident, when in reality
| that is very unlikely to happen.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Does the playpen in the back of my mom's WV Bus count?
| jvm___ wrote:
| I've sat backwards in the trunk of a Ford Taurus station wagon. A
| few years later there was one at a demolition derby - after the
| first hit there wasn't much car left behind the rear wheels...
| Eep!
| maxwell wrote:
| I glanced at motor vehicle fatality rates in the U.S. previously
| and didn't see a clear impact of seat belt laws myself, instead
| the major drops seem to line up with economic recessions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35833165
| derbOac wrote:
| This is getting tangential but it's striking to me how fatality
| rates went up during the pandemic. You can see the dips during
| previous recessions and energy crises like you're saying, and
| I'd expect something similar during the pandemic, but it went
| the other way.
| brewdad wrote:
| People were bored sitting at home. Getting out in your car
| and driving stupidly fast on empty roads was one way to
| alleviate that boredom. My 25mph road regularly became a drag
| strip.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Seems likely, I had to keep going to work in person during
| COVID and my commute to work became very fast, and not just
| because of the empty roads. I also wonder if there was an
| uptick in fatality as people started returning to work and
| those used to speeding down an empty road were suddenly
| confronted with traffic.
|
| Also reminds me of some statistics I saw back in drivers ed
| class. I don't remember the exact stats, but in winter
| months there were significantly more crashes due to
| inclement weather/poor visibility as one might expect. But
| there were more fatal crashes in summer because people
| drive faster when they have clear conditions and line of
| sight.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > fatality rates went up during the pandemic.
|
| They went down during lockdown in some places. I think the
| severity of lockdown is likely related, and New Zealand's was
| more severe than most.
|
| https://www.1news.co.nz/2020/12/31/sad-and-
| disappointing-202...
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| That's likely because people do not instantly start obeying the
| law the moment it's instituted - takes time to break a habit
| and lax enforcement (honestly how many people do you know who
| were pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt) would result in no
| noticeable cliff in fatalities. Instead it probably gets
| absorbed in the gradual fatality reduction you see over time.
| maxwell wrote:
| Good point, seat belt utilization is impossible to track
| accurately (until in-car surveillance cameras are fully
| rolled out), and likely varies widely generationally,
| regionally, etc.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| US's NHTSA has stats on belt use rate from 1983-2017 based
| on the National Occupant Protection Use Survey: https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_use_rates_in_the_Uni...
| viraptor wrote:
| ~10% not using seatbelts in 2017 is extremely surprising
| to me. I really thought it would be ~1%.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Humans are terrible at risk management and there is still
| a stupidly large contingent of people who think seat belt
| laws are "nanny state", or that seat belts are "more
| dangerous" and they'd "rather be thrown clear in an
| accident"
|
| Basically a lot of people operate on cartoon logic.
| midasuni wrote:
| More common than mobile phone usage
|
| https://metro.co.uk/2023/08/17/police-use-ai-to-
| catch-300-dr...
| cogman10 wrote:
| There's a bunch of people that will say "It's none of the
| government's business if I wear a seatbelt or not, so I'm
| not going to in protest of the nanny state"
| dfxm12 wrote:
| In the places I drive, you _can 't_ get pulled over for not
| wearing a seatbelt. You can only get cited after some other
| violation, like speeding or blowing through a stop sign.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| In many countries the police can pull over a vehicle and
| fine a passenger that isn't wearing a seatbelt.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Many places in the US, you can be ticketed if a passenger
| isn't wearing a seatbelt. But I think the point GP is
| making is that it's also not a primary offense in may
| jurisdictions -- you can't be pulled over for it
| specifically, but it's fair game if you get pulled over
| for something else.
| [deleted]
| kn0where wrote:
| I can't tell if this article is AI generated or just sloppily
| written. The organization is really weird. There are just two
| (very specific) subheadings in the piece: "Bunny Bear Booster
| Seat (1933)" and "In the 1970s Car Hammocks for Babies Were a
| Thing (1970s)", but these sections discuss multiple different car
| seat designs besides the title ones, making me think these
| "sections" were LLM-generated.
|
| None of the photos are specific to the sections of the article
| they appear in--it's as if the author just did a google image
| search for "old car seat" and sprinkled them throughout the
| article with no particular chronological or contextual
| significance.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It reads like an AI generated article. There also doesn't
| appear to be a by line. The site has a contact form, but no one
| is named in the contact us or about us page. To me, this points
| more to AI generated than sloppily written.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It is kinda weird: It'd be one thing if it was simply an
| unordered list of photos, but the text seems like it was
| randomly interspersed too.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I didn't read it, just enjoyed scrolling through the photos.
|
| It's at least awesome that such a collection of photos exists
| of a topic that would otherwise certainly be entirely
| forgotten.
|
| Do you think archeologists might still be able to find this
| series of photos in, say, 500 years?
| moribvndvs wrote:
| I mean, I just google image searched "historical car baby
| seat" and all those photos showed up, almost in the same
| order as the article. To answer your question, if Google is
| still around, yes.
| [deleted]
| aimor wrote:
| Wow this reminds me how much I miss all the legroom we used to
| have without a floor/center console. In modern cars I feel like
| I'm penned in a tiny personal pod.
|
| I'm hopeful electric cars lead to a return of leg room.
| fsckboy wrote:
| that little seat with the steering wheel? I had one of those, and
| I still remember it from age ... 3? 4? I remember the day I
| realized that moving the steering wheel back and forth all the
| time is not the way you drive a car, as fun and obvious as it is
| that it should work that way. I noticed my mother was holding the
| wheel straight so I started imitating her. (looking back now I
| can see so much of my generalized autism: playing with matchbox
| cars, I spent most of my time setting them up for parallel
| parking, and then for diagonal parking between the stripes. I
| hated when my friends wanted any type of "fantasy" play, i just
| wanted to be realistic all the time.)
|
| I concur that the main point of those car seats was as a booster
| seat, to get the kid up high enough to see out the window so they
| could better occupy themselves and not squall, but perhaps my
| perspective is biased.
|
| Also, that woman driving the car in the white heels? looks pretty
| much exactly like my mother.
| greggsy wrote:
| It's interesting that you use the way you played with matchbox
| cars as an example, as I've seen that exact scenario used by
| therapists to inform an autism spectrum diagnosis in children.
| Probably not a coincidence, since they're a very, very common
| toy that's accessible to every demographic in western
| societies.
| erulabs wrote:
| Kids are certainly less likely to be injured these days - but car
| seats for a dollar! Raising kids in the last 100 years makes
| normal consumer inflation look like a cute joke - modern car
| seats are easily 200x more expensive!
|
| It's a horrible actuary table to make, especially as a parent,
| but the engineer in me does some napkin math:
|
| A) Number of children killed in car seat accidents
|
| B) number of children not born due to increased financial burden
| of any given child
|
| If B > A, we're down net-children. Is "more kids" better than
| "safer kids"? Who's to make a judgement like this?
|
| It's a gruesome math - and not one that applies to the
| financially well off: if you can afford it, you're not
| complaining about increasing your child's safety.
| jlawson wrote:
| It's not just about financial costs, it's also the physical
| space limitations.
|
| Cars generally can only fit 3 carseats. Regardless of equipment
| costs, that makes it infeasible for parents to have a 4th
| child. They wouldn't be able to go anywhere.
|
| This by itself has prevented thousands of births.
|
| I've known people for whom this was a major factor in a
| decision to not have another child. They are always the most
| thoughtful, low time preference people whose kids would benefit
| society the most.
| woobar wrote:
| The cars with more than 5 seats do exist. If cost is not an
| issue as you suggest, it is pretty feasible to have 4+
| children. It is even easier if you are not aiming to have
| them born in a rapid succession. Older kids can ride upfront.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but they are vans or large SUVs. You have a lot less
| choice as you can't look at most cars, and they generally
| use more fuel.
|
| Just going from 2 to 3 kids shocked me at the cost
| increase, and we already had a minivan (hotel rooms sleep
| 4, so now we have to get 2 rooms or a suite). There are a
| lot of other things that go up a lot more than you would
| expect when you have more than 2 kids. Kids eat free is
| normally each parent can have one free kid.
|
| Overall kids are not very expensive, and I'm glad I have
| them. However there are a number of things we can't do
| anymore. Family memberships are well worth it for us since
| most of them are one price no matter how many kids you
| have, and thus cheap entertainment for the rest of the
| year.
| kevinpet wrote:
| Did you read the same essay as me?
| https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
| cameldrv wrote:
| This was still a problem in the 80s after mandatory seatbelts
| came in and cars got narrower. Some people say that 3 across
| is too hard with a normal car but I've found that even with a
| small car you can get 3 in without much trouble if you just
| get narrower seats.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| In the early 70's we'd drive down to Cornwall on holiday with
| my cousins - 3 adults and 3 kids squashed into a bog standard
| saloon car. It seems completely inconceivable now.
| cameldrv wrote:
| You can buy a car seat that meets the U.S. federal standards
| for about $60. Sure it won't be as padded or have the maximum
| safety or have lots of cupholders, but it will do the job and
| be much safer than what I had as a kid.
| RobinL wrote:
| You can also (in the UK at least) buy a second hand 'good
| brand' for about PS20 from Facebook marketplace, or free if
| you're lucky.
|
| You can't get one from eBay or a charity shop because
| ridiculously they're not allowed to sell them in case they're
| unsafe (eg they've been in an accident), but I imagine the
| actual risk to the child of gambling on a second hand one is
| miniscule.
|
| We've had all ours second hand, 5 in total including ones
| bought for the grandparents cars, and we've spent less than
| PS80 in total
| jandrese wrote:
| In the US secondhand car seats are almost impossible to buy
| because the expiration date on car seats is so short. You
| sometimes can't even reuse car seats for a second child
| because everybody knows that a seat manufactured before
| 2020 is a total deathtrap and there have been so many
| safety innovations it is missing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "total deathtrap" is a wild exaggeration.
|
| The expiration dates are to force you to keep buying them
| instead of re-using what you already have.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The expiration dates are to force you to keep buying
| them instead of re-using what you already have.
|
| Maybe. I _do think_ that the foam they use for impact
| absorption[1] has a limited life, and degrades over time.
|
| [1] I assume it's the same or similar foam they use in
| motorcycle helmets, which degrade over time. I personally
| won't use an old helmet (say, 4 years), even if it has an
| expiration date in the future (which I also never check -
| I know when I buy it, so I know when I am going to
| replace it).
| rodric wrote:
| > "total deathtrap" is a wild exaggeration.
|
| Sarcasm ;-)
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Those expiration dates generate so much waste. We just
| give ours away on craigslist.. better than a landfill.
| [deleted]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Car seats for a dollar when median family income was about
| $3,500 a year. It's about the same.
| gumby wrote:
| My parents were quite concerned about car safety and tell me that
| when they bought a new car after I was born they insisted that it
| be fitted with seat belts even though the salesman insisted that
| it was a waste of money (mid 1960s).
|
| Also my parents: they bought my sister and me chid car seats "so
| you could look out the windows". Basically a shallow plastic bowl
| with a cushion attached and a folding wire frame underneath to
| make it higher.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Was it a Cosco Go Seat?
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/195773905158
|
| That's what I had as a kid. I don't recall a cushion, though.
| Also, the plastic developed a crack and would painfully pinch
| your skin if you were wearing shorts.
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| I used to stand on the front seat with my mom driving (she was a
| terrible driver btw). She also took us kids once on a road trip
| around the mountains at 12000 ft elevation, lots of snow and
| exposed roads. This among other negligences unrelated to driving.
| A true miracle we made it into adulthood.
| h2odragon wrote:
| 70s kids rode in the back of the pickup truck. They'd yell at us
| not to jump around too much back there.
|
| Car seat laws are fun, they often talk about size and (hopefully,
| usually) age: Some small people have a legal grey area where they
| should legally be in a car seat as they learn to drive.
| resolutebat wrote:
| In Singapore even today, all passengers in a car must wear
| seatbelts, unless they're crammed into the back of a pickup
| truck.
|
| https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3131590/singa...
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Meanwhile my son is almost 3 and already approaching a size
| where he legally only needs a booster seat.
| deckard1 wrote:
| 1980s kids too. I remember after tee-ball my entire team would
| hop into the back of the coach's pickup and ride to get ice
| cream.
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