Melanie Raposo: Hi everybody! I'm Melanie Raposo and welcome to the Pregnancy Show. When you're a new mom, it's wonderful to have friends and family give you their used baby stuff to help save some money. But if they offer to give you their used car seat, you may want to think twice or you could be putting your child's life at risk.
Stephen Burns: All car seats have an expiration date on them. If you are going to buy a used car seat or loan one to your friend, check the expiry date, okay. I'm going to just going to see that there. This one is December 2012.
Melanie Raposo: When buying any used item, looks can sometime is be deceiving, and especially with used car seats there could be a problem and just by looking at it, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Stephen Burns: If you're going to get a used care seat, don't -- you need to know the history of it. If it is a one time use product, if it gets involved in a motor vehicle collision, the car seat needs to be replaced. This car seat here was involved in a motor vehicle collision. So I use this car seat for training, but when you look at this car seat, you would think, oh, it's good till December 2012; there are no cracks on it. It's a brand new.
The lady only used it for one month, okay. She got rear ended and her car was a write off. Unless you put it under a microscope, you don't know if there is a crack or a hairline crack in the plastic, or the structure of the car seat, okay. You have no idea if this would hold next time around. And for the 150$ that this car seat costs, its well worth it for your child's safety to replace it.
Melanie Raposo: Constable Burns also cautions that used car seats can potentially put your child's life at risk as they are less safer and use outdated technology.
Stephen Burns: These are two types of forward facing car seats. This over-the-hedge shield one is no longer manufactured, okay. But as you can see it's what's called 3 point harness, one, two and this is the third one, okay. So there are only three points. There are a lot of these seats around; you need to check them the day it was manufactured. If it's over 10 years, Transport column it says 10 years, you have to throw it out.
When you throw your car seat out, cut the straps, okay because if you put your car seat at the curb, somebody will drive by and somebody will pick it up. This car seat, a newer car seat is a 5 point harness. I call this the Racing Car Driver. So you have one, two, three, four and five. So this is what your standard race car driver will have in his race car, 5 point harness that holds him in very well.
Well, this one is only 3, so here you can see with this particular model, there is nothing supporting the hip side to side. So although it still meets the standard, it's not as up-to-date as this one. You will see with this type of car seat too, with the chest clip, we talked about the chest clip earlier. What we get is people put this on backwards. I'm going to put this on like this. If this chest clip is on like this and you get rear ended that comes out.
Once there is no chest clip, child will come out. Well, this one here is a lot better because it locks in place. So we're locked in. So if you have an older car seat, you have to make sure it goes underneath and it looks the same, the two belts look the same once you put the strap in.
Melanie Raposo: Not only it's important to always check the expiry date of a used car seat but it is also very important to find out if there have been any recalls on it that could put your child in danger. To find out more, watch our car seat hidden dangers video only on the PrengnancyShow.com.
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