RACE hosts experts meeting on child safety

Publication date: 20 October 2008

The Royal Automobile Club of Spain (RACE) has hosted a high-level meeting, with over 30 European experts in child road safety, to discuss and analyse potential improvements in restraint systems for small children.

Their conclusions will help to improve the systems used by Automobile Clubs and Consumers' Associations to guarantee protection systems' effectiveness.

Periodically, Europe's Automobile Clubs publish reports on child restraint systems where safety and ease of use of devices is analysed and evaluated. These reports set out to make it easier for parents to choose what to buy by providing an in-depth analysis of front and side impacts, installation and anchorage, and do so by awarding an overall evaluation in points.

The strategy to unite their efforts represents a further step in safety system development, a challenge to reduce road accidents and injuries that represent the leading cause of child death. Never before in Southern Europe has there been a pan-European meeting of all safety system manufacturers, Automobile Clubs, and Users' Organisations in the quest for improvements solely designed to boost child safety.

Among the conclusions was the need to develop improved products, information exchange, and evaluate systems to know the efficiency of child seats, and the future evolution of such programmes that already enjoy wide acceptance by end users when choosing the best restraint system for their children.

RACE, in collaboration with child restraint system manufacturers, has carried out several actions to promote child safety, such as the distribution of 500,000 in-car safety leaflets, crash tests to show the consequences of not using restraint systems, and the creation of www.tenecesitanprotegeles.com, the first exclusive portal in English and Spanish on in-car child safety, where the user can access full information on safety with animation and videos.