Keeping Kids Safe in the Car with Latch Connectors

Most of the cars make the installation of child safety seats difficult. If you want to keep your kids safe in your car, you have to seat them in a properly installed child safety seat. Latch connectors or lower anchors for children will make the process easy. Standardizing these anchors that car seats attach to will be a good idea. A new survey has pointed out that latch connectors in many cars are more difficult to use than they should be. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has observed that only one fifth of the high selling car models have latch connectors that are easy to use. This institute has teamed up with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute to assess how easy it is to use latch connectors in each car. Three factors were analyzed during the survey. The ease of access, how deep the anchors were in the seats and the ability to set up the child seats using less than forty pounds of force. A major problem found by the inspectors was that buckles and the plastic housing interfered with the anchors. The anchors often were buried deep within the backseat, forcing the adults to dig around in the cushions to find them. The latch connectors in most cars are hard to reach and many cars also avoid them for the middle seat. Only seven per cent of the cars in the survey had latch anchors in the middle of the second row seats and that is the safest place for the children to travel. If you are getting a new family car and you have young kids, you have to look for latch connectors that make child safety seat installation easy. The car models that made child seat installation easy were adjudged as Audi A4 Quattro, Cadillac Escalade and the Chevrolet Equinox among the top range. Models that failed the easy installation test were the 2011 Buick Enclave CX, Chevrolet Impala and Dodge Avenger Express.