When
most of us imagine what future luxury cars might look like, we might
picture ultra-comfy seats or watching movies during boring stretches of
road. When the car-safety nerds at Volvo think about it, they come up
with a safer way for the most vulnerable beings in our world—our kids—to
travel by car.
As
an alternative to strapping babies and small children into add-on seats
in the back of the car (where we can’t even see them without some
jerry-rigged mirror), Volvo’s designers have come up with the Excellence Child Seat Concept.
Just unveiled in Sweden, it rethinks the interior of the car around
everyone—baby, child, and adult—who rides in it. If you’ve ever had to
wrangle a wriggling infant into an old-fashioned car seat, you’ll wonder
why it’s taken us this long to come up with a better system.
The
basic idea of the Excellence Child Seat Concept is to reconfigure the
front passenger seat so that the child can sit there facing the back of
the car—the safest way for small passengers to ride. “A child’s head
weighs a lot more in proportion to the body, and the neck is weak,”
explains Lotta Jakobsson, Child Safety Specialist at Volvo Cars in a
press release. “That is why we strongly believe that children should
travel in rearward facing child restraints until they are three-four
years old.”
Volvo has done a lot of safety studies
to arrive at this belief—and has the crash-test dummy reports to prove
that young children do not fare well in crashes when facing forward. But
in a rear-facing seat, the entire back of the seat supports the child’s
spine and neck, providing a much better chance of escaping from
accidents unscathed.
Once
that front seat is removed and replaced with the smaller child seat,
the interior opens up. Drivers or passengers in the back seat can easily
see, touch, and tend to the child; eye contact is easier. Other
conveniences are made possible, too: A drawer under the seat can hold
toys and supplies. The seat swivels so that it’s easy to get a child in
and out of the seat through the front door. The heated cup holders in
Volvo’s XC90 become a great place to warm a bottle. When the car is in
motion, the seat locks safely in place.
“We
have been investigating the nature of progressive luxury for some
time,” says Tisha Johnson, Chief Designer Interiors at Volvo Cars
Concept and Monitoring Centre in the announcement. “And we see a direct
connection between luxury and emotional well-being. For us the safety,
convenience, and emotional factors outweigh everything else.”
As the name implies, the Excellence Child Seat Concept is just in the conceptual stage now. But it might not be long before babies of the future—and their parents—will get a safer ride.
