Airbags are not designed with the bodies of children or infants in rear-facing carseats in mind. They're actually really dangerous for them - potentially lethal.

And most vehicles have methods to disable airbags when the item/person occupying the seat can not safely handle it.

But if you want to get real sad, IIRC many airbag systems are not designed with an occupant outside the parameters of a typical adult male in mind. Some modern systems are getting better about this, but if you're too short, too tall, a woman, or other-wise-outside-of-the-norm, good luck.

It's worth noting that here in Australia cars have no such method, and you are not allowed to put a car seat in the front seat.

Equally when travelling as best I can tell all European cars have a method to do this and you can install in the front seat.

So this probably varies by country, but I am not sure which countries have what or where the USA is.

Without specifically checking I imagine that the Australian Design Rules basically wouldn't allow them to add the option even if they wanted to - if I had to guess because you're not allowed to have such a disable button (which you could argue could also be dangerous in some cases if pressed or used when it shouldn't be).

What goes wrong with a woman that is the expected size?

Very few women are of the expected size (5' 9" tall) aimed to represent the average male; most women automatically falls into the "too short / other-wise-outside-of-the-norm" as far as car safety testing was concerned until recently - AFAIK cars made since 2012 should be also tested on smaller, female-sized dummies which also created an incentive to alter how they are built.

Well if that's it then making a list of "too short, too tall, a woman" is double-counting.

Also if you take it as exactly 5'9" then airbags aren't suitable for men either. What you need to do is examine the range it's designed for. It's not the average height that matters, it's what percent of men/women fall inside that range. There might be a significant difference in that percent, or there might not be.

There is no such thing as an "average" person: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

That analysis has been done, and there is a significant difference in that amount. You can back-of-the-envelope it yourself if you know that the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4" with a standard deviation of about 3.5".

> Airbags are not designed with the bodies of children or infants in rear-facing carseats in mind.

According to FMVSS 208, they're tested using an unbelted 50th percentile size male dummy. That's the reason they deploy with more force and are triggered at lower impact speed had they been designed with belted occupants of varying sizes in mind.

They are tested without belts to ensure the airbag doesn't kill idiots not wearing their belts. But on all modern cars they're designed to work together with the seatbelts.

If you unplug the cable at the bottom of a BMW seat (so it doesn't know the seat occupancy and belts) it will disable the airbag and show an airbag light.

I suspect they were in the process of disabling the airbag when this all kicked off.

I think it’s illegal in some states, but I could be wrong.

I find it unlikely that, if you don't have a rear seat, you cannot legally carry a child.

It's true in Australia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761210

I do not see any where that's the case.

https://saferide4kids.com/car-seat-laws-by-state/

LMGTFY: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/child-passenger-safety/i....

> Buckle all children aged 12 and under in the back seat.

> - Airbags can kill young children riding in the front seat. Never place a rear-facing car seat in front of an airbag.

Many modern cars have the ability to disable the front passenger airbag, for when you do need/want to put the seat in the front.

And, for some cars, the front seat is safer for everyone, including children, thanks to the focus on improving the safety ratings for front seat passengers (which are often advertised) [1]. For example, my car last car had side curtain airbags only in the front.

On average, especially with older cars, I assume the CDC is probably right. Their recommendations necessarily have to be the most useful for the average/masses.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/study-shows-back-s...

Not all child seats are rear-facing child seats.

No but for tiny little newborns, all are. Something about not having proper muscle structure around spine to handle thrust forward during frontal (most common) crash. Also reason why you should never shake babies or expose them to any form of higher G.

We're changing the child seat to front facing right now - our baby is 10 months old. It can be done little bit earlier but not too much.

You should actually hold off for longer

> In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released new recommendations for car seat safety. As part of these recommendations, they removed their previous age-based recommendation that children remain rear facing in car seats until the age of 2.

> The AAP now suggests that children remain rear facing until they reach their rear-facing car seat’s weight/height limits which, for most children, will leave them rear-facing beyond the previous age recommendation.

Source: https://www.healthline.com/health/childrens-health/forward-f...

My wife and I got into an argument about this when it was time to switch our kids car seat so I pulled up their recommendations and read their sources. Their cited evidence doesn't support their recommendation at all (nor did it when they first made the rec in 2011).

Their 2011 rear facing recommendation is based on a retracted article and their 2016 rec is based on the same article's data except using a smaller dataset which they acknowledge is not statistically significant. The only other data cited looks at rear facing Swedish children compared to _unbelted_ Swedish children.

I went back and reread it to make sure I was remembering right. I'm dumbfounded that this was allowed not only to stand as a rec, but was increased (deepened? made stronger?) when they had even less data than they did before. I get that it feels like it should be safer, but that's not science and I would have expected a group making medical and safety recs to maintain a higher standard.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/5/e201824...

I didn't say they were all rear-facing. lisper asked "Why couldn't you put a car seat in the front passenger seat of a two-seater?" I don't know anything about safety of front-facing or booster seats for kids in front seats. But I think my response was a reasonable answer/example of when you wouldn't want to put a car seat in the front passenger seat.