Putting kids in the front seat of cars...

Perhaps you are going to strap your young kid in the front seat of your ute. This is legal (in a single cab, as far as I know) - but is it safe?

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QUESTION:

"My son is 6 and has really taken to fishing and camping. I only have a cab-chassis Hilux, and have noticed that the RTA allows a child in the front passenger side, on a booster seat... What are your thoughts on this?" - Jamie Fitzgerald

In a perfect world, only adult-sized humans would ever sit in a front seat. Airbag deployment choreography is kinda precise, and brutal. Airbags deploy at brutal speed and their spatial movement assumes an adult human will be doing the interacting. Average six-year-olds are only 1-1.2 metres tall - and this dimensional deficit is a serious spanner in the works, vis-a-vis airbag interaction, which could lead to a poor outcome in a crash… .And, Jamie here is probably driving a long way to go camping, fishing, get sunburned and find a death adder in his sleeping bag. All the fun outdoors stuff. And he’s probably driving at high speeds, too, like highway speeds, and also on imperfect roads - all of which amps up the risk of a high-mechanism collision. On the flipside, modern Hiluxes are quite safe. And driving’s really not that dangerous. In the 12 months to September 2020, just 1107 people died on the roads - that’s 4.9 per cent down on the same period last year, and 9.1 per cent down for deaths over the past six months (thanks very much, COVID-19). Injury rates on the road: roughly 40 to one. In other words, roughly 40 hospitalisations for every death, and about half those injuries are notionally ‘serious’ - meaning (in statistical terms) requiring more than one day in hospital. And, obviously some (I don’t have the data) result in lifelong disability - brain injuries and that kind of thing. In a population of nearly 25 million, it’s hardly as if road trauma is out of control. Despite what the cops and the regulators and the media would have you believe, driving is actually quite safe. Especially if you do it responsibly and capably. But there’s never been a benign transport system - and there never will be. Only 27 people aged from newborn to 16 died on the roads in the past six months, and they weren’t all in cars. Some would have been pedestrians. Being in a car is not all that dangerous for children - especially if your parents are responsible drivers who put you in the correct restraint. If you drive responsibly, conservatively, and even better, if you get advanced driver training, and if you’re diligently monitoring the environment for hazards, such as approaching dickheads, and formulating numerous ‘plan Bs’ - and not fatigued, or texting, or whatever - then you'll have a nice time camping with your young son, with very little elevation of tangible risk. In fact, when you think about all the things that can go wrong camping - all the poisonous reptiles and spiders, the blue-ringed octopus at the beach, the shark attacks, the falling out of a tree or down a cliff, the drowning … the trip there and back is likely to be the safest part of the whole Technicolor camping montage.