My faithful readers may remember my previous rant on car seats. I just installed a new car seat in our Mom-mobile. (The old one seemed fine after the accident, but you don’t want to take chances.) In the course of installing it, I discovered that the old one was not installed correctly. Or not as correctly as possible. Or something like that. Turns out there is a trick to tighten the seat more than I had before, and that our car has a tether hook. Neither of which I had done correctly, despite rereading the instructions on the previous carseat a good dozen times.
I just need to vent again. 80-98% of people install these devices incorrectly. That’s an amazing number. What other consumer product can get away with that? What other consumer product, whose sole purpose is to save lives, can get away with only a sliver of people understanding their product well enough to get the full safety?
Doesn’t it seem like Graco is setting themselves up for a class action suit? It’s not that their product is defective per se, just that it’s next to impossible to use correctly. (Any lawyer readers out there?)
Give me some feedback here — I can’t be the only parent who is pissed off about this.
To be fair, there were a few comments on the first post. Informally, I’ve yet to find anyone who disagrees with me on this.
Guess you really were the only person pissed off about this, since this is the first comment, over 3 years later!
I know exactly how you feel, though I do absolutely see the benefit of having had my infant cocooned safely within the carseat (you didn’t do the latch correctly? bad daddy, hehe).
That said, I do see some inherent problems with saying that my daughter has to be over 6 years old (as NH state law dictates) before she can be out of a car seat! And most police departments recommend being over 4’9″ tall before removing the car seat altogether?? Just a tiny bit of overkill here, people? Ya’ think?? I’ve got a couple of female *adult* cousins who are nearly that short, and I realllly don’t think they’d take too kindly being told that they had to strap a booster to their butt.
I do tend toward protecting the welfare of our citizens against their own stupidity (motorcycle helmets were kinda invented to be worn, I think), but in this case, the government is going wayyyy overboard.