Increased crash safety is high up on the list as to why people buy SUV’s. But there is very definitely a growing section of the motoring public that are concerned about the safety of passengers in the third-row seats of SUVs and some MPVs.
The question comes from those that understand crumple zones and intuitively know that the third row is very much at the extreme point where an impact zone on a car is stretched beyond the point of safety.
Third-row seats are generally small and access a bit of a palaver so mostly it is the kids, our most precious cargo, that get stuffed back there.
But as I researched the topic, what struck me most was how little I could find on the topic. Insanely, most crash tests only look at what happens to the occupants of the third row during frontal collisions like this one or this one.
The simple fact is back seat passengers are not as well protected in the back than in the front according to the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the further back you go the higher the risk of injury.
Ouch!
It worries me. The demand for a third row of seats is so high that manufacturers are cramming them into ever shorter vehicles, just think how many ‘cross-overs’ there are now which are intrinsically a saloon car on steroids, with ever diminishing crumple zone size.
Yet, there is very little research going on into rear end collisions in the lab and very little collection of real-world collisions data.
Worse still even if you are the most responsible and safest driver in the world, rear end collisions are rarely the fault of the driver or owner of the vehicle.
Just imagine you have buckled up the kids into their safety seats in the third row, you stop a traffic light and then a distracted or maybe drunk driver doesn’t see you and rear ends you at 60 or 70 or 80 kph. The result is just to difficult to think about.
There are some things that you can do to make the third row safer. But for me, if I am putting my kids into the third row, it will only be in a full-sized vehicle and whenever I am at a standstill at the traffic lights or in a jam, I will firmly have one eye fixed on the rear view mirror and a right foot ready to make an evasive manoeuvre.
