Reprinted from Strategic Safety News , Vol. When products are engineered with narrow compliance margins, the level of safety risk increases, even if the product is in technical compliance with the minimum standard. I am urging each manufacturer of child restraints to ensure that these restraints perform well beyond the minimum requirements of our standard.
American families expect, and deserve, no less.
Child seat makers were also called on their reluctance to conduct safety recalls and attempts to avoid issuing recalls by claiming that only a fraction of the seats may be affected by a particular safety defect. A total of 74 child restraints have been recalled since 1990. This represents 19,678,948 child seats that were placed on the market. The agency is currently considering a ranking system similar to the NCAP crash test program to rate child seat performance.