Rear seat safety in modern passenger vehicles is being “neglected” by car manufacturers around the world, despite contributing to a higher proportion of occupant fatalities than any other seating position.
More often than not, the life-saving occupant safety technology is already available to front seat passengers, but is being overlooked for rear pews because of ageing crash safety regulations, a vehicle safety seminar in Sydney heard yesterday.
Julie Brown, a research fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia, told the ‘Bringing up the rear’ safety seminar that, despite typically being the furthest point from contact in a motor vehicle collision, rear seat deaths and injuries were being over-represented in accidents. The trend applies to occupants aged 9 years and older.
“The rear seat has historically been neglected and now we think it’s the time to put some attention onto the rear seat because it’s a place where we can actually gain some reduction in injury and fatality numbers simply through using existing technologies,” said Dr Brown, who recently headed an Australian sample study on rear seat occupant safety.
“We know that one in five passengers that have been admitted into hospital have been sitting in the rear seat and even though, in absolute numbers, most numbers come from front seat passengers or the driver. If you look at it in terms of proportionally to the deaths in each position, proportionally there are more deaths in the back seats than anywhere else.”
Authorities are now investigating enforcing basic rear seat technologies already considered commonplace for front seat passengers. These include seatbelt pretensioners and load limiters, improved seatbelt geometry and seat design, and adjustable D-rings which can adjust the height of the seat belt at the pillar.
Lauchlan McIntosh, the chairman of the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), said rear seat safety would soon take on a greater importance during local testing. The Japanese NCAP program is currently the only authority around the world to rate vehicles specifically for rear seat occupant safety during crash testing.
“In the future, we’re actually talking about putting different dummys in the back seat and evaluating that in a separate rating away from normal occupants – certainly to start with,” he said. “In the long term, all NCAP systems would like to incorporate the component ratings into the overall rating, but that will be several years away.”
In the meantime, car makers are slowly filtering potentially life-saving technology through their line-ups on their own initiative. In 2010, Ford in the US developed an inflatable seatbelt designed to spread the load of a collision for front and rear seat passengers.
“The seatbelt feels no different when you put it on but during a crash the shoulder component of the belt inflates like an airbag and distributes the load across the chest,” said safety researcher and former Ford engineer Dr Priya Prasad.
“It would substantially reduce injuries over the standard three-point belt, the distortion of the head and neck is less and so the chance of hitting anything in the forward part of the car is less.
“It would prevent many of the fatalities we’re talking about among rear seat passengers if it came to Australia.”
ANCAP has never tested for rear side impact protection, a loophole that allowed manufacturers to leave out potentially life-saving rear side airbags but still achieve a maximum five-star rating.
Given many governments and companies now often stipulate a five-star NCAP rating it meant car makers could leave out potentially life-saving features but still achieve the top rating.
It took Ford, for example, years to fit standard side curtain airbags in the rear of its once popular Falcon large car despite most competitors fitting them standard.
Some European car makers are also taking advantage of the lack of independent side impact testing, presumably in an effort to save money by not fitting full-length curtain airbags.
While it's understood Euro NCAP has no plans to address the issue with its testing the Australasian NCAP arm is closing the loophole and will soon require side impact airbags in the rear to achieve the five-star rating, something likely to impact some new arrivals next year.
However, because ANCAP does not retest models when it updates its testing it means the existing models - such as the Renault Clio and Volkswagen Up - will continue to be awarded a five-star rating even without the side airbags.