Solving the child seat conundrum
In Octane 198 I mentioned that I’d driven my Fintail Mercedes to the UK so that I could have seatbelts installed at Quickfit SBS in North London. During emails with Quickfit’s technician Pawel, we’d discussed the technical requirements for my young son’s child seat, because I wanted to be sure that it would be compatible with old-style belts. Not surprisingly, fitting a child seat is one of the most common reasons for installing seatbelts in a classic car – but what is surprising is that there’s no standard procedure to make them work together.
I’d already chosen a child seat made by Allison Baby UK on the basis of tests conducted by TCS, the Swiss Touring Club, which praised its safety compared with some more obvious choices, and so I contacted Damon Marriott, their head of product development, for advice.
‘It is impossible to prepare, as we do for modern cars, a list of classic cars that could be equipped with our child seats,’ said Damon. ‘There are too many types of aftermarket seatbelts for us to create a standard procedure. However, it is mandatory that the anchor point does not protrude more than 3-3.5 inches from the seat itself – a longer one could break in an accident. On the other hand, there’s no problem at all in using a seat without the Isofix base, which was primarily created to add stability to the seat.
‘Of course, if using a child seat in a car without the Isofix base, it has to be securely belted in;
otherwise it could turn into a kind of loose cannon inside the cockpit. Inertia-reel belts are preferable to adjustable statics, because the latter are very difficult to fix properly. We suggest replacing a child seat every five to seven years, depending on how much it’s been used and how it’s been stored: a car parked outside in the sun or in the cold causes a seat more stress than one that’s parked in a dark and heated garage.’
For my 230, after a lot of deliberation I picked seatbelts that were closest in colour to the seats, so they are less obvious from outside. However, because the traditional-style metal buckles and clasps are not certified for use with child seats, I opted for two kinds of anchor: the classic buckles and clasps for when it’s only adults who are travelling in the car or when the seatbelts are not in use, but in addition, hidden under the seat cushion and ready to be pulled out when necessary, modern black buckles for use with the child seat.
Since arriving back home in Italy, we’ve finally been able to use the 230 for taking our son to school in the morning and to the ice-cream parlour in the afternoon, and everything worked perfectly. So far, so good: let’s hope I never have to put the system’s effectiveness to the test.