to be cynical about carseat expiry dates

[mikado1]

We have a maxicosi which is 5 years old but apparently it has 'expired' and is therefore not 100% safe. What do you think of this?

As others have said, plastic fatigues over time. Having seen how the plastic insides of my (very nice at the time of purchase) 10 year old suitcase shattered on one gentle trip, I don't trust plastics long term in safety situations.

Same with bike helmets, you should replace them every few years. PITA as the helmet can still look fine, but is it worth the risk?

I spoke to Britax about this and they said that there is no expiry date on car seats in the UK. It is up to you to assess the seat and decide whether it is still safe to use.

It is up to you to assess the seat and decide whether it is still safe to use.

How do you that, non-destructively? Here's a video of an elderly seat failing fairly dramatically:

But such testing would make the seat unusable anyway.

I have no idea. But it explains why seats don't have expiry dates.

I would usually agree with you but (and this is going to sound so stupid) but those daft loom bands, that were all the rage last year, made me realise recently how easily plastic etc. can degrade. My son found a whole load of the bands he had made for us all and when we put them on the plastic was pinging off and snapping. Now obviously that is tiny elastic bands and easy to break but they had literally not been touched in a year and were disintegrating in our hands. Plastic weakens.

meta that's the which video I referred to up thread - scary.
But I do think the manufacturer's should be forced to make them last better ...maybe not really on plastic to support the harness
They are an environmental nightmare really.
These are the sort of harness my DBs had - secured to the car body - like an adult seat belt.
Apart from difficult to install (but then according to the police a badly fitted seat can be as bad as no seat and when they did a spot check in a supermarket carpet more than 50% seats were not suitable/incorrectly fitted ) and not easily transferred between cars (or comfortable for an adult passenger to sit on top of I guess) - they seem like a more robust and longer lasting idea!

*rely not really

I think car seats should be built in - maybe not the baby one but stage 1 up - have a middle part to the seat that pulls out or spins around or something. Impossible to fit wrongly, no plastic parts to expire...

I think car seats should be built in

Saab and Volvo, at least, had built-in seats as options. They're expensive, complicated, make the folding of the back seat for luggage complex, and only needed by a tiny proportion of car buyers. There's no way they could be standard.

These are the sort of harness my DBs had - secured to the car body - like an adult seat belt

Yes, those were fitted to my parents' cars for my brother and me in the 1960s. The problem is that they don't provide any lateral location, and they are inherently forward facing.

meta that's an adult racing seat I think? So a built in harness and something like that -maybe using isofix or fitting to the body. I did say for older toddlers -iirc group 0 seats aren't really that safe for newborns anyway? (No seat is).
And I'm sure you could design something rear facing, isofix that had the harness (and maybe a shield) that didn't depend on a (degradable) plastic shell to hold the harness...even material - seatbelt webbing is longer lasting...

I didn't know this about car seats, my youngest is 17.

However, we Horse Ride and once the helmet comes out of a controlled environment (in which these things are stored, not getting hotter/colder/daylight etc) then you replace them every five years.

As for less deaths on the road, it is to do with Car shapes, speed limits and better Medical treatments, a lot of people are left with lifelong conditions, though, including drivers.

"We didn't reek havoc" (in 47) because we were smacked, or left at home, if we misbehaved.

As for car seats being built in, some people will never travel with children, so fine to have them for an option, but we shouldn't have them foisted on us all.

A dog guard, harness etc would be more useful for me, as would a tow bar, as standard.

Sorry, the picture related to a point I decided to delete about lateral location: I was going to talk about the built-in head restraint.

But since you mention it, no, adult racing seats do not have built-in harnesses. The seat has slots for the straps, and the straps of the harness locate direct to the chassis, floorpan or monocoque. The seat is bolted to the vehicle, but the forces of most accidents go to the structure of the vehicle. The seats in F1 cars, as an extreme example, are either completely loose or are at most velcro'd to the car: the driver is strapped in, and that strapping locates both the driver and the seat within the monocoque that takes the load. A saloon racing seat, as pictured, has to take the load of a rear or side impact (eg, if the car is struck from behind, the seat must not collapse) but that's not related to the harness and the load is spread all over the seat.

Child seats are unique in that impact energy travels through the seat, from the harness in the seat to the harness or isofix points it's attached to.

even material - seatbelt webbing is longer lasting

Seat belts elongate in an accident: that's what they're designed to do. The whole point of adult car safety systems is to lengthen the impact pulse: the car hits a something solid and decelerates almost instantly, and the crumple zones, seatbelts and airbags lengthen the deceleration of the driver so they take 50g (which is survivable) rather than 200g (which isn't, certainly not without a HANS device).

That's why isofix is so good: it's rigid. The child seat works by having a rigid shell with an energy absorbing liner and energy absorbing webbing; the problem of child seats hung off the seatbelts is that the requirement of a seatbelt (to stretch) are at odds with the requirements of locating another seat.

The obvious material for a child seat would be carbon fibre: light, immensely strong, durable, not wildly expensive these days. There have been prototypes:

www.carbonfibergear.com/carbon-fiber-childrens-car-seat-prototype-by-rory-craig/

but I don't think anything's made it to the market.

Metacentric all this info is fascinating. Thanks for posting it.

meta I think we are talking at cross purposes - I did understand how that seat worked - what I meant by a 'built in harness' was one attached to the car frame rather than the seat...like the harness I posted before
so the main force in a collision from the harness would be on the car frame not the (degradable) seat...
And carbonfiber does seem like the perfect way forward - and lots of people did seem interested in that seat...but as I said before there is no motivation for the big manufacturers to produce something that 'lasts' for more than one child even in the same family. And they have no resale value.
Currently they can get say £1000+ out of a family with 2 dcs for car seats spread over several years - more if you are a two car family and want a seat in each car. So they would need to sell them for £500 each to make the same amount of money...

(I did actually use second hand seats for mine -but ones that were given - not sold and within their expiry dates (bar the one I mentioned up thread) so the person giving had no vested interest in lying about the history.)

And also for others be aware temperatures in attics can vary considerably - in summer they can be boiling and winter freezing -so stored in an attic is not the best place (although there will be no UV degradation) .

So they would need to sell them for £500 each to make the same amount of money...

That seems reasonable, actually. You can buy an adult car seat in carbon fibre for a grand, after all. And they'd be lighter to handle.

The plastic and polystyrene degrade. It is the same for motor bike helmets, horse riding hats, etc. In motorbiking and horse ridding I've read a few news reports of people actually dieing in the accident and coroners stating it was down to an out of date helmet/hat.