NHTSA Will Finally Require Child Safety Seats to Protect in Side-Impact Crashes

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will soon start requiring child safety seats to be tested in side-impact tests as well as the front-impact test already used.

• Congress asked NHTSA to come up with a rule like this more than 20 years ago, but better late than never, right?

• In 2021, a group of 17 state attorneys general wrote a letter to NHTSA that said not having side-impact tests in place "unnecessarily endangers children on the road and does a huge disservice to families."

It has taken longer than safety advocates, Congress, and many state attorneys general wanted, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has finally issued a rule for updated side-impact crash tests involving child safety seats used on passenger vehicles. NHTSA was supposed have issued the rule in January.

Before the new rule, child safety seats were only required to prove their efficacy in tests that simulated 30-mph front impact crashes. The new rule adds a 30-mph side impact test, also known as a T-bone crash, to the list.

Test Dummies "Tossed Around" in Earlier Testing

The problem with the previous system, as CBS News and ProPublica reported in 2020, was that NHTSA gave some booster seats passing grades even though "the test dummies were violently tossed around during the tests," CBS News claimed this week. The problems CBS and ProPublica reported on led to a House Oversight Committee investigation that found that some booster seat manufacturers were “[endangering] the lives of millions of American children and misled consumers about the safety of booster seats by failing to conduct appropriate side-impact testing.” CBS published some dramatic footage of these crash tests.