Wall St Journal Reports: Safety Agency Probes Complaints of Children Trapped in Graco Seats

On Oct 20 The Wall St. Journal reported that there were many complaints regarding consumers being able to remove a child from Graco brand car seats and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was launching an investigation into the validity of these complaints.  The reports indicate that sometimes people need to go so far as to cut the harnesses to remove the child from the seat after normal (non-accident) use.  The models identified are: Nautilus seats from 2009 through 2012 with model numbers 175166, 1761306, 1763461, 8J00MTX, and My Ride 65 seats from 2009 through 2011.  Do you have any of these seats?
  Have you had the problems identified in the article?   If you have had problems, you should contact Graco and/or the NHTSA.  The most effective way to help if you are having problems is to contact both organizations.  If there is indeed a problem, a double pronged approach would help to make the solutions appear quicker and help out the community.

A Graco My Ride 65 car seat

In doing the research for this post, I came across some great resources for car seat safety that you might find helpful, these will be posted on the product safety page as well:

Safercar.gov  Parents Central : Some great information and resources for keeping your kids safe when they are on the move based on research and historical analysis.

File a Child Seat Safety Complaint: Child car seats are made to protect our little ones in the event of the most unfortunate experiences and by law they are to be tested to meet specific standards to ensure they work when needed; if you find that your seat is not preforming well (for example its too difficult to unlatch or too easy to unlatch), then you should let the NHTSA and the manufacturer know.

Register your Child Restraint: In the event of a safety recall all manufacturers are required to notify all registered owners by first class mail that their child restraint is included in the recall.But manufacturers can only do this if they know you have purchased their product.  Safety registrations by law are not allowed to be used for any other purpose aside from notifying consumers of a recall, so if you neglected to register your seat because you thought you would be bombarded with ads and spam-- follow this link and register now!  It is never too late to register your products unless you have been unknowingly using a recalled item and you or your child is injured or worse.