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The performance advantage of seat belt pretensioners is well documented. But what is the effect for child restraints? We tested four categories of CRS with and without seat belt pretensioners on adult seat belts, using the ECE44.03 dynamic test. We compared outcomes in terms of head excursion, head and chest deceleration and HIC (“Head Injury Criterion”) and used a common type of pyrotechnic pretensioner. For infant restraints, pretensioned conditions lead to a reduction in head excursion and HIC. Two forward facing toddler seats showed lower HIC, and one a large reduction in excursion. Pretensioning led to reductions in HIC for forward facing impact shield boosters and for belt positioning boosters. Three CRS were also tested in a pre-impact braking mode, with and without pretensioner. Here the differences were less pronounced. On the whole, pretensioners did improve the outcome for CRS, in particular for designs which did less well in the “normal” mode.

The performance of child restraint systems (CRS) in precise and constant laboratory testing and their effectiveness in real-life-accidents may differ substantially, mainly due to the variety of interface conditions between motor vehicles and CRS and to misuse of the CRS by the consumer. These differences may grossly impair the safety performance of CRS in a traffic crash. Most accident reports available to crash researchers lack detailed data on crash severity that can be related to injury severity. However, reports usually include full information on injuries of all occupants. The paper proposes a comparison of the injury rate of restrained children and belted adult occupants, the latter “substituting” the unknown data on crash seventy. Given a sufficient number of accident reports, the effectiveness of CRS under real-life-conditions can be assessed, providing a very useful tool, particularly for CRS manufacturers.