All car seats licensed for sale in the United States must meet the requirements set by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) but what does that really mean, and why do we at babyark put our car seats through a series of even more rigid testing?
How do you simulate a crash?
In order to recreate the acceleration that occurs in an accident, crash tests are conducted with a sudden increase in speed. Testers then observe the behavior of the car seat and the “child” within it during this pulse (an acceleration curve measured in the car during a crash test), measuring acceleration at both the child’s head and chest.
Of course it’s important to remember even before diving into further discussion that a laboratory test cannot fully emulate real-life scenarios and the multitude of variables we cannot control nor foresee. Even a few milliseconds later within the same test scenario or simulation may contain a number of fluctuations that could impact test results, and the same test run at alternate times or by other testers will have different results. Everything from the angle at which the dummy is positioned to the humidity in the air can impact results. Because we are talking about child safety, a few tests are not sufficient. As the safety of our children is a direct repercussion of decisions made, we place even more of an emphasis on attention to detail. Thus, one can understand why despite the fallibility of one test and the challenge of gleaning conclusions from even a series of tests, we run countless tests in every relevant scenario. Additionally, it’s important to remember at each and every stage that, despite running tests and creating a car seat that meets incredibly stringent safety standards, car seats must be installed properly in order to function as the manufacturer intended, and it is important to employ safety precautions at all times, including defensive driving!
What is measured in a crash test for convertible car seats?
Crash tests mimic car crashes with frontal or side impact. For convertible car seats, they are conducted with configurations of a newborn, 1 year old rear facing, a 3 year old rear and forward facing, and a 6 year old forward facing, with a variety of dummies constructed specifically to replicate the relevant installation methods for each age and weight - Isofix only, belt-only forward facing, belt-only rear facing, belt-only forward facing with top tether, and the babyark recommended installation. We examine various unexpected situations to minimize common misuses, try to foresee and think through possible scenarios and adapt for safety.
Being that younger infants are more vulnerable to injury in crashes due to their accentuated fragility and less developed skulls and necks, we calibrate our testing to compensate even more for their susceptibility upon impact. babyark seats go through testing for almost every scenario we can imagine, and we don’t rest until it’s ready so that you can rest assured that you’ve chosen the best seat for your little one.
What do these tests measure?
One of the primary metrics in determining car seat safety is HIC (Head Injury Criterion) - the likelihood of head injury, the predominant injury in children and therefore a leading concern in design for babyark. With sensors across and inside the test dummy, internal and external motion are both recorded and processed to correlate chance of injury.
Current federal standards allow a HIC score of up to 1,000. When what is being measured is the wellbeing of our children, nothing is good enough, and in this case, aiming higher means aiming lower.
Better than Good Enough
While all car seats on the market must come in under this federal maximum of 1,000, CEO and founder Shy Mindel conceived of babyark for his own children and knew a “passing grade” would not be enough. As in nature, from which much of the inspiration for the seat was taken, babyark knew that birth takes time.
Five years of development, testing and retesting, iterations, studying every detail, and implementing improvements passed before launching the first babyark, and we have not stopped working towards “better” for one moment since. In picking collaborators like the one and only Frank Stephenson, designer of McLaren and Ferrari among others, finding each source material, crafting the structure, and fine-tuning each detail, babyark spared no resource, effort, or expense. Because when it comes to our children, good enough is not good enough, and we set our standards high and our aspirations higher to achieve the best we can, and then push further still.
So, while regulations dictate a HIC score of up to 1,000, babyark runs many more tests than legally required to come as close to peace of mind for parents as one can.
What you see in our HIC scores is an important piece of the puzzle to understand how the right car seat handles crash impact across various ages. Look out for the geeking-out-about-engineering details in another piece for those who want a true behind-the-scenes breakdown.
What’s important to ascertain is the essence of the information, which boils down to thousands of hours of research, excellence in engineering, and testing to prepare for the impossible to prepare for and undesirable beyond all else - a real crash. The crash simulations themselves last around 0.1 seconds in their entirety - that’s it. What does this mean for everything surrounding this tiny blip on a clock? Your car seat needs to be at peak performance at all times, ready for anything.
In order to assess crash readiness and the protection for your child, we check two essential parameters - the probability of head and chest injury. HIC grades give relatively accurate reflections of the likelihood of serious head injury for each experiment (age, installation type and facing direction and other data points in each crash simulation), whereas when we measure the influence the crash may have on your child’s chest, we measure maximum acceleration experienced by the dummy. These criteria are indicated by testing authorities in the US as vital to understand crash repercussions, and our hundreds of tests have shown the life-saving benefits of crash protection technology.
When examining our crash test results (based on hundreds of tests and iterations), babyark’s strength in design comes through. The combination of the intelligent structure and premium materials keep baby safely in their seat, absorbing and distributing the energy of the shock away from the baby and into the seat. This translates to a smoother, extended, cushioned “landing” as opposed to one abrupt force. This is evident in our test results, but also provides safety that goes beyond what these typical measures illustrate, and is another reason why babyark tests above and beyond requirement and regulation.
One of the benefits of and reasoning behind our selection of construction for the babyark was the independence of adjustment our car seat entails as part of its very vision. Instead of relying on installing a car seat with proper tension in the seatbelt, assuming that the elements are threaded properly, hoping that human error does not render less effective some of the car seat mechanisms, or understanding that the physics and thus outcome will change based on the baby’s age, angle, and a million other variables- babyark built our convertible car seats with internal energy absorption technology that can be tested and adjusted to provide a high level of control uniformly for all age groups. The babyark rigidly connects to the car and is supported by the structure of both the base and the front load leg, kept sturdy by the anti-rebound bar. Aviation-grade technology of the SafeCoil™ allows for calibration in the engineering stage to optimize a superior layer of protection in front impact without relying on the driver to remember any specific instructions in installation or upkeep. BioArk™ provides parallel side impact protection.
Read more about how babyark is specifically designed for crash protection here.
The only constant is change
It’s important to keep in mind that real-life scenarios include hundreds of variables, and the tests themselves may have different results depending on the time of day, the tester, country or specific industry speciality, or other factors.
The results we report are representative of hundreds of tests we run, but each one is a moment encapsulated in time and susceptible to variables beyond our control. Because of this, we discard outliers and seek to recreate reasonable clusters of similar results. We are aware that different methods and standards will lead to other results, as is the case in any experiment. This is part of why we are so rigorous and vigilant with our own testing with every single change we make to our products.
Because it’s one thing to say “believe us,” and it’s another to bring proof. We believe in hard data, transparency for educated decision-making, and know that trust is earned.
A car seat with good energy
As the principle of energy absorption was the key to the very conceptualization of the seat from its original vision into its design and development, results that indicate that the mechanisms of the base and protective nature of the seat’s shell truly function as foreseen are welcome validation. And hearing from satisfied customers whose babies fall fast asleep on even the bumpiest of car rides are icing on the cake.