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Chevy Highlights Innovations During National Child Passenger Safety Week

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This week has marked National Child Passenger Safety Week, nestled nicely into Baby Safety Month. In honor of National Child Passenger Safety Week, Chevy took some time to highlight a few of its latest innovations to benefit child passengers in its vehicles.

National Child Passenger Safety Week

Chevy celebrates National Child Passenger Safety Week.

The first, of course, is the removable headrest on the rear passenger side seat in the Chevy Colorado (also available on the GMC Canyon). This innovative tech lets parents and guardians remove the headrest and plug it into the seat cushion to elongate the space on which the child safety seats and booster seats rest. This is absolutely necessary, as many manufacturers of these safety seats require at least 80 percent of the restraint to be supported by the actual seat of the car.

Chevy also highlighted the Impala, which has “generous rear seating [that] provides plenty of room for carrying children safely and comfortably without encroaching on the space for the adults in the front seat.” The Impala’s LATCH anchorages are among the easiest to access in the industry.

“GM conducts a variety of assessments on vehicles to make sure rear seats, safety belts and child restraint LATCH anchors accommodate a wide range of child restraints on the market,” said Julie Kleinert, global technical lead for child safety at General Motors. “Safety belts are developed to work for a range of occupant sizes, including adults, child restraints and children who are too large for child restraints.”

National Child Passenger Safety Week

©GM

Another Chevy innovation includes the shoulder belt comfort guides designed for those in the backseat of vehicles. The guides help parents to position the shoulder straps of seatbelts on their children once they’ve outgrown the car seats but aren’t yet ready to move up front. Making seatbelts comfortable at this young age isn’t all for nothing; GM hopes that this promotes children to maintain their seatbelt habits into adolescence, the teenage years, and adulthood.

Chevy highlighted two other innovations as well. The first is a glow-in-the-dark emergency trunk release, in case a child somehow becomes trapped inside the trunk. The second of the innovations is the set of rear door safety locks so that curious kids in the backseats can’t open the doors while the car is in motion.

“We know there’s a lot that goes into traveling with children, so we try to make the experience as safe and stress free as possible,” said Kleinert. “Being a mother and grandmother myself gives me a first-hand understanding of the concerns of parents, which is why we work to make it easier to keep kids safe in our vehicles.”