To think its utter bollocks that child car seats have only saved 1 life a year since they became law

[NeedsAsockamnesty]

In the UK.

I have just seen that claim made by someone and it's boggled my brain.

It can't be right can it?

And even if it is what about serious injury.
Every report I read says pretty much child car related fatalities and serious injuries decrease almost every year.

I know someone who had a crash with their toddler in the car in his car seat. The police or fire brigade told the family he only survived because he was in a correctly fitted child's seat. The mum who was driving was badly injured and took a long time to recover.

Silly question, but how do they know? They would have to NOT be in the child seat to know if they would have died wouldn't they?

True.

The effectiveness of safety precautions can only be measured statistically, i.e. by counting how many people were injured or died in general.

The people whose lives are saved don't know that for sure, in most cases.

Even worse with speed limits. There's about a third less fatalities in countries with speed limits, but people never know they would have died in a car accident if there hadn't been a speed limit.

Analysis of 10 years of data in the United States showed that 4 to 8 year old children in booster seats were 7.7 times less likely to suffer moderate to serious injuries in frontal and side impacts than unrestrained children, They were also 13.3 times less likely to suffer moderate to serious injuries in rear impacts and 23.6 times less likely to suffer these injuries in rollover crashes.

I think it can be correlation as well though.

How many countries which don't have speed limits have a rigorous driving test, a driving test where the examiner can't be bribed, or any enforcement of having a licence at all?

I believe speed limits save lives but it won't be completely related to that. People still speed despite limits, after all.

crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/809778

Another America publication.

71 percent of infants in passenger cars who would die without a child safety seat would survive the crash if they were restrained in a child safety seat.

Pretty obvious that this means more than 1 life saved a year.

I can't find it now but there was one study/document which showed a clear spike in the number of deaths among even restrained children at around one year of age, this was attributed to people beginning to use forward facing car seats, and was one of the motivations behind the R129 regulation to keep babies rear facing until 15 months.

This one perhaps? Doesn't mention a 'spike' though but does show the effect of moving ff too early. www.nhs.uk/news/2009/06June/Pages/CarSeatWarning.aspx

No it was a long PDF file of a retrospective study of crashes where children were injured, possibly from Germany.

It might have been the "retrospective cohort study" they mention.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598309/ ? USA though, not Germany (and I've not found you a PDF either :) )

The last time I looked it up, I was interested in the effect of extended rear facing seats. At the last time of looking there were 19 child car passenger road deaths in the U.K. in 2015.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/533293/rrcgb-main-results-2015.pdf
Since this covers age 0-15, and only ages 1-4 would be affected by a universal change to ERF and not all the deaths would be preventable by a move to ERF then a figure of about one a year seems reasonable.

Obviously if you're looking at a country where the roads/drivers are more dangerous (i.e. anywhere that isn't the U.K. or Scandinavia) then there is much more to be gained by improved child restraints.

Don't worry, I think I have it saved somewhere anyway, I just don't have it to hand to link :)