to put DD in the front seat of the car?

[Bingtata]

I need to do a long journey this weekend and it will be just me and DD (4) for the first time. She has always sat in the back of the car, but I'm wondering if it might be easier to have her in the front seat, but I truly don't know if there is any reason why I shouldn't do this. She has a Britax Evolva Booster seat which holds the seatbelt in the right position as it is a full booster seat. We have front airbags too. She never tries to get out of her seatbelt or anything she is really good in the car.

it isnt illegal to put her in the front but she would still be safer in the back. If she is in the front then put the seat back as far as possible from the dashboard

MY DN was very very nearly blinded as a result of being in the front seat in a minor accident when the airbags went off - they are coated with a fine dust that can cause blindness. It affects children because they are smaller and hence receive the full blast of the airbag. The consultant who treated him bollocked his father and said that the last child he had treated in this scenario had been permanently blinded. The BMA came to take photos of DN to use in a poster campaign about not letting your child travel in the front.

I am not usually one to be very precious about safety but in this case, it's an unnecessary risk.

Thank you Seona and staranise, that is all I need to know. In the back of my mind I thought it wasn't a good idea but I just couldn't rationalise why. I'm sure she will be fine in the back, so as you say it is an unnessacary risk so I won't be taking it.

AFAIK you shouldn't let a child travel in the front unless you disable your airbag.

really? they're covered with something that blinds people? that seems a really stupid idea!

sapphire it's ok as long as they aren't in a rear-facing seat, in which case yes you would have to disable the airbag

"It affects children because they are smaller and hence receive the full blast of the airbag. "

Only if the seat is moved forward. If an adult steps out of the car and is replaced by a child in a booster seat, they are both the same distance from the airbag.

Thanks guys, I'm printing this thread to show my friend who asked my opinion on basically the same thing about a week ago. I too thought there was something wrong with doing it, but I couldn't remember why. Thanks again .

omg i am googling this now, abnd whilst i am sure i would be glad of my airbag in a bad crash i am shocked at the toxicity of it!!!

Apparently it's like talcum powder and stops the airbag sticking to itself as it deploys. Because children's faces are lower down the powder is still travelling very fast from the explosion and can damage their eyes. Adult's faces should in theory be further away and the powder is travelling more slowly and therefore doesn't damage their eyes.

Well that's the theory I've been told anyway - it does seem to make sense.

And, actually by the time the bag deploys, a child will be further from the airbag, because the seat belt will stretch less and the pyrotechnic pre-tensioner will be more effective, as children weigh less.

Moreover, it's essentially impossible to propel dust through air for any significant distance at any significant speed. The individual particles are light and fine, which is why you don't read of people being injured by having icing sugar thrown in their face.

The metal azide powder used as a propellant in airbags is fairly nasty, so being in a car in which the airbag deploys has the potential to irritate your eyes, potentially quite badly. It's not going to make a lot of odds where you're sat. The reason for turning airbags (and the associated pre-tensioners) off when there are rear-facing seatbelts is that it risks the child being crushed between the child seat and the adult seat, not anything to do with the propellant.

Exactly Al1son - lit's a very fine white powder to keep the airbag dry and non-sticky. Like I said, I'm really not someone who gets het up about safety usually but I saw DN's face myself - and it took at least 6 weeks for his sight to return to normal. It took a week for the swelling go down enough for the doctors to be able to tell whether or not his vision would be permanently impaired. His father felt absolutely terrible.

the damage is caused by sodium azide which is used to deploy the airbag

the powder itself is just talc/cornstarch but it's all released at the same time

I don't know the fine detail. The airbags hit DN (front passenger) and BIL (driving). BIL was fine, DN (aged 8) wasn't. The accident was minor but enough to activate the airbags. There was no one else in the car so I don't know how/if they would have been affected. The consultant and the BMA both stressed the problem was because DN was in the front.

And, of course, plenty of cars made in the past five years have airbags that fire into the rear seat compartment anyway. Side curtain airbags are no uncommon (firing down from the roof along the whole line of the windows), and airbags mounted either in the side of the front seats or the B post between the front and rear doors are almost universal. I'd be interested to know which seat in a modern Golf, to name a family car, isn't fitted with airbags which fire roughly into the space where a child's head might be.

www.edmunds.com/ownership/safety/articles/105563/article.html

" The consultant and the BMA both stressed the problem was because DN was in the front."

It would be interesting to know the evidence. For example, if you buy a 2010 Golf, where would you put an eight year old so that their face was away from a deploying airbag in an accident? The boot?

Personally I wouldn't. Not for a 4YO with an empty car.

I do let DD age 6 sit in the front if I have a full car ie of other children, and I always put the seat as far back as possible.

I guess the safety benefits of airbags outweigh the risk to the eyes - which must depend on the height etc of the child anyway.

Funny thoughh as DN lives in a fairly remote part of the UK and this was the second incident the consultant had seen that month - as I said the other child was unlucky enough to be blinded.

Somewhat unrelated, but I listened to a child safety talk by a fireman recently, in which he stated that the safest place for a child in the car is the middle seat in the back.
quite surprised at this as I always thought it would be behind either the driver or front seat passenger.

Of course if you have more than one child this wouldn't work.

Most car accidents are frontal so rear seats are the safest plus front airbags are designed for adults hence can be dangerous for children. I remember being told that the seat behind the driver is the safest but I don't know if this is true.

"Most car accidents are frontal"

They aren't. They might be for one of the cars, but how often do you think two cars have a head-on collision? Think about the scenarios: pulling out of a junction, failure to stop in a line of fast traffic, spin/slide on slippery road: one car will take an offset, the other a side or rear impact. For both cars to take a frontal impact would involve, what? Overtaking accidents in which neither car swerved?

The problem is that most car accident tests are frontal (perpendicular to a concrete block), which is why the FIA has been funding NCAP to investigate offset accidents and side impacts.

Frontal impacts, when they happen, involve more energy and there's (usually) the mass of the engine and (almost always) the steering column and pedal box to worry about, which is why the driver's in the most dangerous position. And also, of course, there's always a driver in the car, whereas the other seats aren't occupied 100% of the time.

But the reason why there's endless arguments about this sort of stuff is that cars are getting better, long-term studies involve cars you aren't driving anymore and everyone's got an anecdote. For example, the middle seat is safer than the rear side seats if all three rear seatbelts are equivalent. They rarely are.

I dont think its illegal to put kids in the front seats, but the airbags have to be taken out of the passenger side, if there was an accident she could suffocate.

children.webmd.com/news/20080507/safest-spot-for-babys-car-seat

Airbags should be disabled (not taken out: there'll be a switch in the glovebox or under the seat) if there's a rear-facing seat. For a forward-facing seat, if the child is going to be in the front (which is the discussion) then the airbag will do more good than harm for any forward-facing child. But you should push the seat back as far as possible (the same goes for the driver: in an ideal world, short women would have the pedals adjusted to be closer to the seat, rather than vice versa).

The webmd article is about children under three in seats that contain their own harness, not booster seats. Seats like that integrate head protection as well. They just need to be strapped to something solid (Isofix is best). It's not comparable with a child on a booster seat, who is much more reliant on the protection offered by the car itself.