You may want to rethink that option package and buy the regular old-fashioned seatbelts. While a great idea in theory with adults and with older kids in backless boosters, if you’re still installing carseats, these belts can cause problems for you depending on your carseat manufacturer. Now sure, this technology is old news by now since Darren talked about it a year ago. But carseat manufacturers are just now putting the warnings in their manuals about installing their carseats using these inflatable belts. Britax is the first to put the warnings in their manuals and Combi is set to follow. Ford has stated that they have tested carseats with the “airbag” seatbelts and the carseats have performed as expected.
What do you do? You follow the carseat manufacturer’s guidelines since they have the best knowledge of how their carseat will perform. If the manufacturer says no inflatable seatbelts, try using LATCH instead to install the carseat or use a carseat from a different manufacturer that doesn’t have the inflatable seatbelt warning. If you’re buying a 2011 Ford Explorer, check the options list on the window sticker carefully to see if the inflatable seatbelts are included. Some dealers are automatically choosing this option when ordering the vehicles from Ford, so you may not have a choice if you’re choosing from a vehicle on the lot. Inflatable seatbelts are also on some commercial airplanes in the bulkhead seats and on many private planes. They are thicker than regular airplane seatbelts, so they should be easy to detect. And there is another 2011 car with the inflatable belts: the Lexus LFA. But I dare you to install a carseat in that car ;).
xmaseve, the RideSafer manual doesn’t restrict the use of inflatable belts, but the last revision was from 2009.
Bonnie, you can see a comparison of an adult dummy and a child dummy booster in a booster at this link: http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=31360 . Like celticlabyrinth said, I don’t think it would cause a problem for a large adult.
Both the lap and shoulder belt retract, so it will should fit obese people as well as boostered children. I wonder if they could make it so that you could separate the lap and shoulder belt, and install child restraints with only the lap belt?
I actually think the technology sounds exciting. It would seem, to me, that the best purpose of LATCH is to allow seat belt designers to only worry about restrain people, not installing car seats. We’re not there yet, but hopefully technologies such as this will help push us in that direction.
Very intriguing. But if the inflatable portions of the belt are at a good length to fit a child in a booster, how will they fit on a large/overweight adult?
I’m sorry if this has been addressed before (I couldn’t find the info if it has been) but how do these work with boosters? If you can’t put any child restraint in them, that would make seats unusable for up to a dozen years!
And I’m guessing my favorite install standby, the Ridesafer would be a definite no in this case.
So what do you do if your child still needs to be in a carseat but has outgrown the LATCH weight limits in one of these cars?
Thanks for this post! I’ve been really excited to check out the 2011 Explorer for other reasons, but I’ve wondered about the seatbelts. If we get one, it will be in a could of years, and not a new one. I hope enough people chose not to get the inflatable seatbelts on their new vehicles to leave me a good used inventory in a couple of years!
Thank you for this update! I had been very curious (and skeptical) about how these would work with car seats.