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New ratings highlight the best cars for child-seat anchoring
Providing a helpful resource for parents, new ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) will begin to formally rate vehicle’s LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children) hardware. In comparison to all of the other attributes that are important to consider when buying a car, information on the child friendliness of cars is sparse. So these new ratings should complement evaluations Consumer Reports regularly performs, assessing how friendly vehicles are to accepting child seats and child passengers. We summarize those in our comprehensive road tests under the header “Driving with Kids.”
It is not uncommon for us to cite how difficult LATCH lower anchors can be to access, particularly when they are deeply recessed or too closely surrounded by seatback foam or cushioning. But LATCH is only one piece—albeit an important one—of the puzzle. Seat contour, rear seat room, and ultimately the ability to install child seats using the seat belts are also key elements of determining whether or not you will be successful at getting a secure child seat fit with your own car.
Families also benefit from a somewhat recent change to child seat labeling, which now does a better job of indicating the relative weight limits factoring the seat and child. This highlights that at some point, your child will outgrow the LATCH rating and you will need to install the child seat using the vehicle seat belt. The heavier your child seat or your child, the sooner that transition will come.
Visit our guide to kids and car safety.
Of the 102 vehicles IIHS tested in this round of results, only a few vehicles were distinguished with overall Good ratings for their LATCH hardware, including:
Conversely, 10 vehicles had Poor ratings:
The remaining 89 vehicles spanned the Marginal and Acceptable categories. Vehicles that rated Poor aren’t unsafe, nor does that rating doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to get a child seat secured with LATCH. Poor ratings indicate that it may be more difficult to find and use the LATCH hardware than it would be in a vehicle that rates better.
Introduced in 2002, the LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children) system was designed to make child seat installations easier than using a vehicle’s seat belt. The system includes a set of lower anchors between the cushion and seatback of some (most often outboard) seats and a top tether anchor for securing the top of the seat. This first round of ratings on 102 vehicles evaluates the ease of accessing and using those two anchor points with a hope of increasing how often they get used. Criteria for rating the lower anchors include the depth of the anchor and clearance around them as well as measured by the force required to connect to them and for top tethers the ratings also look at the potential for them to be confused with other hardware like cargo tie downs.
The impetus for doing the ratings is that the IIHS, like us, is a fan of LATCH’s potential. They cite research that shows that parents are more likely to install the seat correctly when using LATCH and in our own ratings for child seats, we typically find that seats achieve a higher “fit-to-vehicle” rating for LATCH installations than when they are installed using the vehicle belts. By formally rating the hardware, IIHS will provide a key resource for parents and may also prompt vehicle manufacturers to make improvements to how easy it is to use them. By increasing the frequency of their use, improving seat installation suggests those results should ultimately improve child passenger safety.
IIHS admits that these ratings may be short lived. Updates to the regulations that govern implementation of the LATCH system have been proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with similar end goals. We like LATCH well enough that our comments toward those proposed changes support any improvements to accessing the hardware and go one step further in suggesting that the LATCH weight limits be increased to allow LATCH to be used longer. But updating a formal standard can be a lengthy process. In the meantime, the IIHS ratings can serve as another good resource.
—Jen Stockburger
Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.
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