The use of child seats and other restraints to children inside the cars, homologated by official organisms in developed countries, had been recognized as an important factor in the prevention of traffic injuries for children. This is not a reality in Brazil, where the law does not make mandatory the use of special restraints for children inside the car, neither there are official regulations about it. By the Brazilian traffic law only is mandatory the children to travel in the back seat of the car until 10 years old and the use of seat belt. Just now the official organism CONTRAN (National Traffic Council) is discussing the mandatory children restraints. The aim of this work was to evaluate the capability of the cars produced in Brazil to support internationally homologated equipments to children restraint. There were evaluated the cars models produced in Brazil by different manufacturers (General Motors, Volkswagen, Fiat, Renault, Peugeot, and Ford). In this work only cars with retail price bellow 30.000 euros (thirty thousands euros) were evaluated because in this group are the most popular cars. The results point that is impossible to install correctly some children restraint equipments in some models because of characteristics of the car models. Also, is not usual the existence of last generation security fixation systems, like the “isofix” support. Other unsafe characteristic is in the group of economic cars, also called popular cars: despite of the cars are designed for five passengers, there are only four safety positions, then in the case of a family with three children could be dangerous to put one of them in the central position in the back seat. In the group of more expensive cars in this work there are some cars with unsafe conditions to five passengers too. (Author/publisher) This publication may be accessed by Internet users at: http://www.ictct.org/workshop.php?workshop_nr=25
Samenvatting