New Safety Standards for Seatbacks
The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 1.35 million people are fatally wounded worldwide in road accidents, and at least 50 million accident victims sustain some form of permanent disability. The road transport system needs great improvements, but so is the modern vehicle design.
The current automobile design and technology plays a vital role in traffic safety; industry experts say that a vehicle should be able to prevent occupants from being injured or worse, killed.
This is where the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) comes in.
For years now, the automobile industry, as well as the NHTSA, have agreed that the standard seatbacks could be improved for better safety. The current Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 207 for seatback strength has room for advancement – more strength, to be precise.
But does the seat quality really have anything to do with the safety of drivers and passengers? Can better seat performance help prevent serious damage during a car accident?
The leading industry experts believe so.
Experts have a Divided Opinion
The modern vehicle seats are far sturdier than they were a couple of decades ago. But David C. Viano, a former scientist at General Motors, thinks that just because a vehicle seat is significantly stronger, it doesn’t automatically guarantee the safety of the driver and the passengers.
When it comes to the performance of seatbacks, there are two groups of experts; one believes that the seatbacks should be “yielding,” i.e., they should collapse to protect the front-seat occupants from severe injuries.
The other group argues that yielding seatbacks are not safe at all because they can cause grave injury to the driver as well as all the passengers as soon as any impact is made.
Automobile manufacturers seem to agree with the first group. They say that stiffer seats would lead to severe injuries while yielding seats will reduce injuries in low-speed rear impacts. Unfortunately, in the real world, where the rear impacts are more often than not at higher-speeds, a weak seatback doesn’t yield in a controlled way.
It simply breaks and caves in, as demonstrated in countless rear impact tests.
NHTSA Tells a Different Story
In a recent report published by the NHTSA, weak seatbacks are almost certainly going to result in severe injuries, but effective countermeasures are available.
According to a report titled Front Seat Modeling in Rear Impact Crashes, during rear impacts, seat dynamic rotation should ideally go down to less than 35-degree to avert injury to the front-seat occupant and people seated directly behind them.
The study was conducted by automotive engineering experts at EDAG. Its goal was to re-analyze the possibility of increasing seat back strength by implementing Finite Element Modeling (FEM). To put it simply, the engineers wanted to determine how the seat performs during a rear-impact crash.
They found that using a high-strength steel gauge of 3 mm (instead of regular 1.8 mm) on the seat-bottom frames was very effective in preventing severe injuries during a high-speed rear impact.
It should be noted that these results are not exactly ground-breaking; various other independent researchers such as Carl E. Nash and Dr. Kenneth J. Saczalsi have also reported these findings in the past. Some experts, including the engineers at ARCCA (Arcca.com), had also previously claimed that the amount of rearward rotation should be limited to keep the seat-occupants safe.
The experts are happy that the NHTSA finally agrees with their conclusions, and this will result in stronger and more reliable seatbacks in vehicles.
Doctors Support the Study
Dr. Teo Forcht Dagi, an expert in brain and spine injury and a celebrated neurosurgeon, says that this move to re-examine the seatback standards means the company officers are actively trying to prevent injuries in road crashes, and this is commendable.
Many others in the medical community also agree that the element of vehicle design in passenger safety is critical, and the automakers should re-analyze their assumptions about the current model. As new data becomes available, it is essential to rethink vehicle design safety standards.
Front-Seat Safety vs. the Rear-Seat Safety
This latest NHTSA report also noted that automakers have significantly improved the vehicle design to make the vehicles safer for front-seat occupants. However, those traveling in the rear-seats have not been given the same attention.
The paper said that the protection for the rear seat occupants also needs to advance as quickly as it is for the front-seat occupants. In the current scenario, the front seat was found to be safer than the rear seat, which is directly in contrast to the age-old belief that the back seat is the safest place.
But if those in the back have more room to move out of the way before impact, it could be better for them. However, this is another topic.
When will the new move be implemented?
The history of regulatory inaction has not been promising so far. This new NHTSA study may help the needle move along to improve the seat safety standard, but no one can say precisely when it will happen.
Engineers, automotive scientists, and researchers have been requesting NHTSA to upgrade the rear-seat standards since 1974. It took NHTSA 24 years to officially acknowledge in 1998 that the measures were short.
But acknowledgment doesn’t mean regulation.
Over the last few decades, many experts have petitioned NHTSA to improve the seatbacks performance, but their requests have seemingly fallen on deaf ears. The agency has announced on numerous occasions that improving seat strength is one of their top priorities, but still, there has been no new rulemaking.
The occupant restraint and automotive seating experts at ARCCA say that they have been observing serious issues with seatbacks since 1989. For the past three decades, they have seen thousands of seat-failure problems that led to severe injuries in rear-end crashes.
As a result, they have been involved in numerous seatback failure litigation cases, and the majority of these cases were settled outside the court, before ever going to trial.
These ARCCA experts also say that due to their work on these litigation cases, they have been able to check the seat-strength data from several vehicle manufacturers. They have also conducted a variety of tests on seat-failure to determine the impact of crashes on new seatbacks.
They said that their decades’ long experience and data collected from these tests show that seats are not just chairs that allow the driver and passengers to sit inside a vehicle; they are also safety devices that protect the vehicle occupants during accidents. A seatback should offer the same kind of protection to the occupants that a seatbelt does.
Can NCAP Help?
NHTSA has also been thinking about adding a rear-impact test to the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) – this is supposed to scare the automakers into improving their seat designs. Otherwise, they will risk losing their stronghold in the market.
In the last few years, advances that have been implemented to the front-seat crash environment have drastically reduced the risk of fatalities and injuries for front-seat occupants during road accidents. While the injury rates for rear-seat occupants are still a bit low, there is a growing need to better understand the rear-seat environment in the latest model-year vehicles, especially considering the new, compact designs.
Despite this, the NHTSA has not moved forward with any new rulemaking or standards.
In October 2018, the agency held a meeting to discuss safety strategies for vehicle occupants, especially the rear-seat occupants, but nothing concrete has come out of it so far. The NHTSA published a press release announcing it is planning to publish another notice of yet another public meeting in 2020, and this meeting will supposedly debut the new changes to the NCAP.
Whatever might come in the future, the industry experts are happy that at least the NHTSA has acknowledged the issues of weak seat backs in this latest report. It may take some time, but researchers are hopeful that someday, we will have seatbacks that are better equipped to keep us safe during rear-end crashes.
This new report also outlines other appropriate design for the vehicle, including the seats to ensure rear-back occupants don’t fall victim to a horrific fate. This is even more essential because it is mostly the children and elderly that are seated in the back because it’s considered the safest position for them. But, as multiple studies have shown, rear-back could be the least-safe place during a car crash.
Watch YouTube Video: Lawmakers Calling for New Car Seat Back Standards. This video explains why lawmakers are demanding new standards for seatbacks.
Sacramento Personal Injury Lawyer
I’m Ed Smith, a Sacramento personal injury lawyer. Car accidents involving bodily injuries can have a devastating impact on your life. It’s critical to determine the liable parties, which could include not only the at-fault driver but also the car manufacturer if an automotive design or engineering related defect contributed to your injuries.
If you or a loved one has been critically injured in an auto accident, you will need an experienced Sacramento personal injury lawyer to establish a strong case to hold the responsible parties liable for damages. Call me today at (916) 921-6400 or (800) 404-5400 for free, friendly advice.
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