Putting kids in the front seat of cars

Perhaps you are going to strap your young kid in the front seat of your ute. This is legal (in a single cab, as far as I know) - but is it safe?

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This report is inspired by a recent question from a dude named Jamie Fitzgerald, a regular AutoExpert tipster, of sorts.

He’s a good bloke, Jamie - he runs a business dedicated to the sexing-up of one’s man-cave/garage. GarageBlitz.com.au for more. (He’s not a sponsor - that’s just an acknowledgement.)

So, the regulations, and the default consensus of safety experts is that kids really shouldn’t go in the front seat, ever. In a single-cab pickup, there’s no alternative, right? So, it’s imperfect, but allowed >>

I think, technically, you can put a young kid in the front passenger’s seat of any car, legally, provided all the other passenger’s seats are occupied by young kids. So a seven-seater could hypothetically transport six young kids - pro tip for all you overenthusiastic breeders out there.

In the domain of good ideas and bad ideas - a kid in the front is less than ideal. In a perfect world, only adult-sized humans would ever sit in a front seat. Airbag deployment choreography is kinda precise, and brutal. Crash survival is somewhat like chemotherapy - it’s the best we can do in a very non-ideal situation. Last resort.

Airbags deploy at brutal speed (about 300km/h) and their spatial movement assumes an adult human will be doing the interacting. Average six-year-olds are only 1-1.2 metres tall - and this dimensional deficit is a serious spanner in the works, vis-a-vis airbag interaction, which could lead to a poor outcome in a crash.

That’s a euphemism. Like, parent’s worst nightmare. Worst day ever. Indelible black stain on life. That kind of poor outcome.

And, Jamie here is probably driving a long way to go camping, fishing, get sunburned and find a death adder in his sleeping bag. All the fun outdoors stuff. And he’s probably driving at high speeds, too, like highway speeds, and also on imperfect roads - all of which amps up the risk of a high-mechanism collision.

Here’s KidSafe’s advice on kids in cars >>

How dangerous is driving, intrinsically?

Modern Hiluxes are quite safe, according to ANCAP. And anyway, driving’s really not that dangerous.

In the 12 months to September 2020, just 1107 people died on the roads - that’s 4.9 per cent down on the same period last year, and 9.1 per cent down for deaths over the past six months (thanks very much, COVID-19). That’s according to the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, which monitors this stuff here in Australia.

Injury rates on the road: roughly 40 to one. In other words, roughly 40 hospitalisations for every death, and about half those injuries are notionally ‘serious’ - meaning (in statistical terms) requiring more than one day in hospital. And, obviously some (I don’t have the data) result in lifelong disability - brain injuries and that kind of thing.

In a population of nearly 25 million, it’s hardly as if road trauma is out of control. Despite what the cops and the regulators and the media would have you believe, driving is actually quite safe. Especially if you do it responsibly and capably. But there’s never been a benign transport system - and there never will be.

These ‘vision zero’ statements from Volvo and various regulators - it’s all bullshit. Living in utopia would be lovely, but vision zero is bullshit. The roads are already safe. Road trauma would be a shitload higher if we all still rode horses. Just saying. And managing the poop in big cities would be a major infrastructure challenge too. Good luck with that.

How many kids actually die on the roads?

So, again according to the feds, only 27 people aged from newborn to 16 died on the roads in the past six months, and they weren’t all in cars. Some would have been pedestrians. Being in a car is not all that dangerous for children - especially if your parents are responsible drivers who put you in the correct restraint.

And you really have to correct all these road death data for dickhead factor, which is somewhat prevalent in road-going tragedies. I’d love to see the breakdown of ‘dickhead-involved’ crashes versus the rest. I’m tipping ‘the rest’ would be a very small proportion. When I say ‘dickhead-involved’ I’m talking about people making atrociously dangerous decisions. Because this kind of thing doesn’t just happen. There is absolutely fault and pre-meditation involved.

In other words, in many crashes, dickheads make bad choices and people get injured.

I’m talking about drunk or drug-affected parents driving unregistered cars at high speed with a couple of unrestrained kids in the back. (Happens all the time.) Box tickers, in other words, to whom the court system appears predisposed to let off rather lightly in my view. Every time they get caught. Over and over again.

If you were able to control for dickhead factor and reinterpret the data, the risk of driving (responsibly) would be nearly zero. At least, it would be trivial, in the context of other risks - like that of climbing a ladder on the weekend, especially if you’re over 50.

Pro tip: If you go up a ladder more than about three steps high, wear a bicycle helmet. Here’s why >>

So, Jamie’s real answer is: putting a six-year-old in the front seat of a single cab ute is not ideal. Just like the rest of life.

A vehicle with a back seat would be safer. Make sure this kid is at least in the right booster seat. (The purpose of which is to optimise the seatbelt ergonomics for the smaller skeleton. Essentially it re-orients the lap part of the belt over the hip girdle and the sash over the left shoulder girdle. So the skeleton experiences the crash loads.) 

If you don’t do that, kids typically slouch forward to get their knees over the edge of the seat, for comfort, and the lap part of the belt rides up over their abdomen, while the sash rides up past their neck - and both of these orientations cause horrific and unsurvivable injuries in high mechanism crashes, which might otherwise be survivable.

(Pro tip for pregnant mums: the lap part of the seatbelt has to go under the baby on board. Across your pelvis. Under the bun in the oven. Just saying.)

So, if you drive responsibly, conservatively, and even better, if you get advanced driver training, and if you’re diligently monitoring the environment for hazards, such as approaching dickheads, and formulating numerous ‘plan Bs’ - and not fatigued, or texting, or whatever - then I think Jamie’s going to have a nice time camping with his young son, with very little elevation of tangible risk.

In fact, when you think about all the things that can go wrong camping - all the poisonous reptiles and spiders, the blue-ringed octopus at the beach, the shark attacks, the falling out of a tree or down a cliff, the drowning - the trip there and back is likely to be the safest part of the whole Technicolor camping montage.

So-called ‘accidents’

Final uplifting - but important - warning: The most dangerous automotive environment for children is the driveway at home. So-called ‘accidents’.

(They aren’t really accidents. They’re preventable. ‘Accidents’ are events without apparent causes. Like, being the future king of England is an accident of birth. Getting run over and killed in the driveway is a preventable tragedy; not an accident.)

Anyway, so-called ‘accidents’ are the biggest killer of children in this country, and the driveway is #2 on the hit parade, as I understand it, after drowning in the backyard swimming pool. When you look at it like that, going away camping could actually be a real life-saver.

But perhaps I am out of touch. See, when I was a kid, I routinely rode in the cargo bay of the family station wagon, and dad could have sat me on his knee, driving all the way from Sydney to Melbourne. And nobody would have batted an eye. These days, if you did that, you’d make the news, on a slow day.

My soccer coach used to drop us kids home after the Saturday game, and we all rode in the back of his ute. This is in the ‘70s - when road trauma really was out of control in this country. Go figure.

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