I attended a media preview of the Chicago Auto Show this week. I had hoped to go for 3 days and to catalog a number of vehicles in regard to airbags, seatbelt arrangements and LATCH attachments. Unfortunately, my baby sitting service (mom) went back home last week and I was only able to work in part of one day of the show. Instead of my detailed survey, I kind of randomly wandered and took notice of whatever caught my eye…
Cheers to Honda Motors, who has put in a 5th lower anchor in the back seat of many of their sedans and SUVs. This allows parents to use LATCH in the center seat, something you couldn’t do on Hondas in previous years. It’s not as nice as having three separate pairs of lower anchors, because you can’t put in three seats at the same time with the arrangement Honda uses. Still, it gives parents a little more flexibility, provided they read their owner’s manual and determine which seating positions and which anchors are to be used! Here’s the arrangement in the Honda CR-V (left), you can see the dots above the seat cushion that indicate the location of the anchors. The 8-passenger Honda Pilot (right) has three separate sets of lower anchors.
Jeers to the Chevrolet Aveo for the worst LATCH anchors. Not only are they hard to reach because they are recessed into the seat cushion, but you actually have reach in to find the the tab on a tiny little zipper and unzip the opening first! Then, the seat padding around the anchors makes the opening very narrow.
Jeers to Chrysler, for only having three LATCH positions in their minivans, two in the 2nd row captain’s chairs and an offset placed third location in the center of the third row (left). On the plus side, you can get a wi-fi enabled minivan, in case you need to surf the internet while driving!
Cheers to Chrysler, for also putting same three pairs of LATCH anchors in my fantasy car, the Dodge Challenger:
I wonder if one of these will appear in my driveway for Valentine’s Day? I would like an orange one with the 5-speed autostick, please. In my next blog, I’ll be handing out the CarseatBlog Awards for the auto show. I think any Chrysler reps reading this blog know what to do in order to get top placement…
the built in boosters are cool, but without additional tether anchors and/or lower latch anchors, what is the point? I’d still want my harnessed kids to have the captain’s chairs for their top tethers and put the boosters in the spots in the back row with no tethers.
Heck, with no lower latch and top tether, it prevents us still from clicking in our clek hbb/nbb, or the Monterey!
So blah… I want more top tethers at least… so the harnessed kids can go back there and the booster riders can use their latch-equipped hbbs and then the built-in no-backs or latch-equipped no-backs.
Come ON Chrysler… I love my minivan from you guys, but you are falling behind in the times!!
My husband will also love the Charger even more than he does already… thank goodness we are done with harnessed seats in his car, so he can’t use that as an argument to get one.
I plan on taking my 4 year old and one year old to the auto some time this week. My husband knows I only want to go for the CPS aspect so hopefully I will get some time to play while he drools. 🙂
3 sets of LATCH anchors in a Challenger? Is that a sure sign that more people are becoming parents later in life: buyers of mid-life crisis mobile need to be able to do their share of dropping the kids off at preschool ;-)?
I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked – a couple years ago when my DD’s were in preschool, there was a dad who would pick up his LO in a Dodge Viper RT10… the only time I’ve see a car like that with a Roundabout in the back!
The zipper itself wasn’t a bad thing. The tiny zipper that is buried in the seat bight and somewhat difficult to grab and pull was the main issue. Other cars use velcro flaps that are much easier to access.
I didn’t do a formal study, but most vehicles did not have optional top tether anchors other than those required by standards. There are some, such as the Honda Odyssey that augments its 3 LATCH positions with two additional top tether anchors.
” On the plus side, you can get a wi-fi enabled minivan, in case you need to surf the internet while driving!”
Awesome, that’s just what I need, who needs to actually see where they are driving (I’m ignoring completely that passengers might be using it).
The zipper thing is not completely stupid. I don’t even have LATCH in my car, but where the female end of the buckle comes out–lots of crud and gross things collect there. I wonder if having a zipper would help. Of course, I’d probably be using the lower anchors, if I had the zipper, so they’d be unzipped…and the crud would still collect.
Maybe we shouldn’t eat as much in the car.
I’m not too upset about not having so many lower anchors, because I find LATCH to be a pain (then again, I’ve only used the horrible latch anchors that are a PAIN to use, I imagine–If I were used to seats where LATCH was actually EASY, I might miss it).
What about top tether anchors? Are they stingy with those?
Chevy has really dropped the ball with their LATCH setup in the smaller cars.
We saw the CTS wagon but didn’t climb into it, silly us. It was next to the XLR Bookmama sat in for a photo, and I was also distracted by the Cadillac Converj concept car up on the pedestal. 😉
Great pictures, especially the drool worthy Challenger, vroom. 🙂 Bookmama and I took a similar approach during a visit to Detroit Auto Show last month, and focused more on the back seats of the cars we checked out, in typical CPST fashion. Plus it was usually easier to jump into the back seat of many 4-door vehicles while other show attendees were taking their sweet time sitting up front, lol. We noticed the lower LATCH anchor and zipper setup in the Aveo and concur with a big thumbs down for that.
Did you see the new CTS wagon? That was pretty nice, too. Sadly, the sculpted rear seats look like a nightmare for carseat installations. Granted, I doubt their target market is the young families with kids demographic.
I posted a pic of it on car-seat.org – http://www.car-seat.org/showpost.php?p=711513&postcount=1. Pretty neat design.
No, I wish I had. Maybe I can go back this weekend or next week. Dragging one of the kids with me could be a chore, though.
Did you get to see the integrated booster in the Town & Country? Very cool! (Though I wonder whether how it would position the seat belt for my 7.5YO – didn’t have him with us to try it out at the Detroit auto show.)