Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [69]
To answer this, we sought out crash-test data for a side-by-side comparison of seat belts and car seats. You wouldn’t think this would be hard to find. After all, every car seat brought to the market must undergo crash testing to gain federal approval. But it appears that researchers have rarely, if ever, run parallel tests on child-sized crash-test dummies. So we decided to do it ourselves.
The idea was simple: we would commission two crash tests, one with a three-year-old-sized dummy in a car seat versus a three-year-old dummy in a lap-and-shoulder belt, the other with a six-year-old-sized dummy in a booster seat versus a six-year-old dummy in a lap-and-shoulder belt. In each case, the test would simulate a thirty-mile-per-hour frontal collision.
We had a hard time finding a crash-test lab that would do our tests, even though we were willing to pay the $3,000 fee. (Hey, science doesn’t come cheap.) After being turned down by what felt like every facility in America, we finally found one willing to take our money. Its director told us we couldn’t name the lab, however, out of concern he might lose work from the car-seat manufacturers that were the core of his business. But, he said, he was “a fan of science,” and he too wanted to know how things would turn out.
After flying in to this undisclosable location, we bought some new car seats at a Toys “R” Us and drove to the lab. But once the engineer on duty heard the particulars of our test, he refused to participate. It was an idiotic experiment, he said: of course the car seats would perform better—and besides, if we put one of his expensive dummies in a lap-and-shoulder belt, the impact would probably rip it to pieces.
It seemed odd to worry over the health of a crash-test dummy—aren’t they made to be crashed?—but once we agreed to reimburse the lab if the seat-belted dummy was damaged, the engineer got to work, grumbling under his breath.
The lab conditions guaranteed that the car seats would perform optimally. They were strapped to old-fashioned bench-style rear seats, which give a flush fit, by an experienced crash-test engineer who was presumably far better at securing a car seat than the average parent.
The chore was gruesome, from start to finish. Each child dummy, dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers, had a skein of wires snaking out of its body to measure head and chest damage.
First came the pair of three-year-olds, one in a car seat and the other in a lap-and-shoulder belt. The pneumatic sled was fired with a frightening bang. In real time, you couldn’t see much (except that, to our relief, the seat-belted dummy remained in one piece). But watching the super-slow-motion video replay, you saw each dummy’s head, legs, and arms jerk forward, fingers flailing in the air, before the head snapped back. The six-year-old dummies were next.
Within minutes, we had our results: the adult seat belts passed the crash test with flying colors. Based on the head-and chest-impact data, neither the children in the safety seats nor those in the seat belts would likely have been injured in this crash.
So how well did the old-fashioned seat belts work?
They exceeded every requirement for how a child safety seat should perform. Think of it this way: if we submitted our data from the seat-belted dummies to the federal government and said it came from the latest and greatest car seat, our “new” product—which is pretty much the same nylon strap Robert McNamara pushed for back in the 1950s—would easily win approval. Since a plain old seat belt can meet the government’s safety standard for car seats, perhaps it’s not very surprising that car-seat manufacturers turn out a product that can’t beat the seat belt. Sad, perhaps, but not surprising.
As one can imagine, our lack of appreciation for car seats places us in a slim minority. (If we didn’t have six young children between us, we might well be labeled child haters.) One compelling argument against