National Highway Traffic Safety Administration May 24, 2005 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act required that a safety rating for child restraints be established to provide practicable, readily understandable, and timely information to consumers. In addition, the TREAD Act directed the Secretary of Transportation to consider placing child restraints in the rear seat of vehicles crash-tested under NCAP. In response to this mandate, NHTSA established a consumer information program for add-on child restraints based on their ease of use, and announced that it would perform two pilot programs to gather additional information about other aspects of child passenger safety. One pilot program would subject child restraints to a 48 km/h (30 mph) sled test. This program focused on the protection provided by the child restraint. The second pilot program placed child restraints in the rear seat of vehicles in frontal NCAP tests. This program focused on the protection the vehicle provided to properly restrained children. Based on the data collected from both pilot programs, the agency has decided not to implement a dynamic child restraint system (CRS) rating based on sled tests, and to continue collecting data from NCAP frontal crash tests to resolve some outstanding technical issues and to gather additional data on the Hybrid III 6-year-old and 10-year-old child dummies. In addition, the agency will develop a better understanding of the real world data and its relationship to NCAP child results. The agency will make a decision on the merits of a vehicle child protection rating in conjunction with any possible revisions to the frontal testing program, which the agency is currently evaluating. Privacy Act: Anyone is able to search the electronic form of all submissions received into any of our dockets by the name of the individual submitting the petition (or signing the petition, if submitted on behalf of an association, business, labor union, etc.). You may review DOT's complete Privacy Act Statement in the Federal Register published on April 11, 2000, (Volume 65, Number 70; Pages 19477-78) or you may visit https://dms.dot.gov.