Is this the perfect child seat?
Volvo Cars’ design team have come up with what can only be described as the perfect child seat. The team completely re-imagined how children could travel safely in cars in the future.
“We started by asking ourselves if we could make life easier for parents and safer for their children when it comes to the child seat experience. We focused on three key benefits – making it easier to get the child into and out of the child seat from an ergonomic and comfort perspective, providing the child with a safe rearward facing seating position that enables it to keep eye-contact with either the driver or the rear passenger and of course including enough storage for those vital child accessories, such as diapers, bottles, wipes, and so on,” said Tisha Johnson, Chief Designer Interiors at Volvo Cars Concept and Monitoring Centre.
It enables parents to swivel the seat counter-clockwise when seating the child and then lock the seat in a rearward facing position. It also provides storage for small items beside the seat and space underneath for nappies, blankets and other larger items.
The Excellence Child Seat Concept, which also provides a function to help small children safely lean back and sleep, is based on Volvo’s clear safety position; that small children should travel rearward facing as long as possible (at least up to the age of 3 or 4). This is primarily due to the lack of muscular strength in the necks of small children and the disproportionate head size and weight* in relation to the body.
“For us the safety, convenience, and emotional factors outweigh everything else. Being able to maintain eye contact with your child , or being able to keep a bottle warm in the heated cup holders in the XC90 Excellence, would go a long way towards making life easier for parents taking their small child on a trip. Such alternative seating arrangements will become increasingly important as we move towards autonomous vehicles,” added Tisha Johnson.
Parents, what do you think? Would you want a child seat like this?