IT’S A MORE COMMON PROBLEM than you might imagine, but having to transport three children under seven in a car is not always simple.
Children up to the age of seven years are required to be seated in a restraint suitable for their size, children up to the age of four are required to be seated in the rear of a vehicle at all times and children between the ages of four and seven are only allowed in the front seat if all rear seats are occupied by children up to the age of seven, some families are faced with the very real need to fit three child restraints across the back seat of the family car.
According to extensive testing, it appears that three child restraints can be fitted across the back seat of most medium to large cars.
Manufacturers, aware that there is often a need to fit multiple child restraints in the rear seat, have also started producing slimline designs.
Despite this, some small cars are simply not capable of taking three child restraints, just as some small cars cannot accommodate three full size adults in the rear seat. Let’s face it, you can’t fit a gallon into a pint pot (sorry metric people, but that’s the old adage – do your own metric conversion). This will cause problems for some families who will need to upgrade to a larger vehicle, and also for grandparents who sometimes will need to accommodate three grandchildren in their car.
There’s not much a family can do if they need to fit three child restraints into a car that cannot accommodate them, other than buy a larger vehicle. Grandparents, on the other hand, always have the option of temporarily exchanging their own car with the family car for those occasions (which also has the advantage of saving you having to fit and remove child seats from your own vehicle).
Increasingly, there are a number of vehicles on the market with a third row of seats but this may not always resolve the problem because there are insufficient anchorage points.
We recommend talking to the sales person at the time of purchase and discussing your child transport needs. Of course, always choose the safest car you can afford, and go for ISOfix child restraint fittings to ensure child restraints are safely and securely installed.