I feel like I’m perpetually amazed at the how much attitudes toward automotive safety have changed since I was a kid, back in the heavily nostalgia-saturated ’70s and ’80s. I’ve written about this before, about how life was cheap back in the day, and nobody thought about automotive safety longer than the time it took to connect the seatbelts together to shut the buzzer up and shove them down deep into the dark crevasses of the car, seat, never to be seen again. But that doesn’t mean nobody was giving it any thought: Ford at least made some sort of choice to maybe at least try to not let infants fly into windshields like so many squishy cannonballs. The result was the Tot Guard.
I find the Tot Guard especially interesting because it at least feels like the first real serious attempt by a major automaker – or any major company – to try and make a genuinely safe car seat. It wasn’t exactly the first like this – there were attempts to make safer car seats prior to the Tot Guard.
The bar was really quite low, initially – if child seats were used at all, they were ones designed to give the kid a a bit of height so they could see out the windows and contain them enough so they wouldn’t get in the way, both reasonable goals, and there is some notion of safety there – if the kid stayed in one place, amused by the goings-on out the windows, they’re less likely to, say, crawl under some pedals or sneak up and cover the driver’s eyes.
Sometimes a child’s seat was simply a place to stick a child, period, like this little seat you could put in a Bugeye Sprite:
All that did was keep your kid out of the trunk, at least for a while. But, eventually, at least some people started to think that, hey, I may want to keep my kid around should I get into some kind of crash, so a few attempts to make safer kid seats happened.
The first really big one was around 1962, when a British journalist named Jean Ames wrote about the need for safety seats for kids, which led to the development of the Jeenay child seat, which was a surprisingly modern-seeming design, including a three-point safety harness in an enveloping seat:
the Jeenay seat was accompanied by other kid car-safety products made by KL Automotive Products, one of which was basically like a big box strapped to the seat you plopped your kid into, the Carrycot Restraint. Honestly, it’s not the worst idea, it just looks like you’re about to mail your kid somewhere.
But right now I want to talk about Ford’s approach to this, from 1967, the Tot Guard, because it really seems like a very different approach to kid safety than the solutions we’ve arrived at today.
Here’s a press photo from the 1973 edition of the Tot Guard:
…and here’s the accompanying Ford-approved caption:
GIVE YOUR CHILD A SAFER RIDE: Ford’s Tot-Guard is designed to give your child essential protection while riding in an automobile. The Tot-Guard is secured by the conventional lap belt which is standard equipment in almost every automobile. Tot-Guard surrounds a child’s body and thighs, and consists of three components: a five-and-a-half pound hollow-molded polyethylene shield, a three-inch high polyethylene seat, and a removable foam pad for the inside of the shield. Tot-Guard provides greater safety for the child in the event of an impact by vastly improved load distribution over the surface of his body.
What I think is interesting about the Tot-Guard, what makes it so different than modern infant car seats, is that it wasn’t really seeking to prevent kids from taking an impact in case of a wreck, but rather to ease the impact. As the blurb says, “The Tot-Guard provides greater safety for the child in the event of an impact by vastly improved load distribution over the surface of his body.”
So, where modern seats strap the kid in, the Tot-Guard itself was strapped in over the kid, and a big, padded panel was placed in front of them, to, I believe, distribute the load if your kid smacks their face into the big, soft-ish panel.
As you can see, the car’s seat belts are used to hold the whole assembly in place, not the kid. It looks like there would be danger of the kid kind of slithering out, feet first? But perhaps even kids aren’t quite that rubbery.
The seats were tested in at least some crash-test contexts, though I’m not clear how conclusive those results were. Period reports still contextualized these seats first in a context of keeping a kid restrained for a long car trip; this is from a Time magazine article from October 1967:
“Seat belts may be all right for adults, but try keeping a squirming five-year-old child buckled up for a long automobile ride. It cannot be done, short of resorting to chloroform. Last week the Ford Motor Co. showed off its answer: a 5-lb. padded plastic body shield called the “Tot Guard.” The child sits on a molded seat; then a loosely fitting, one-piece leg-and-body “cast” is placed over him. The seat belt loops around in front to secure the entire apparatus, allowing the child to move around inside his cast but also to stay in one place.
Ford engineers have tested the device extensively on their own children and claim that the kids ride contentedly for as long as four hours at a time. The Tot Guard will be available at Ford dealers next month at $19.95.”
That $19.95 would be about $180 today, which still seems about right for a car seat today. And I like that the “testing” that Ford engineers did was to see how long their kids could stand to be in it. I mean, no one expected them to run into walls or anything, it’s just interesting to see how priorities have shifted.
Also interesting in the same context is the fact that Ford just didn’t sell many of these seats, because safety simply wasn’t that big a priority for people.
We’ve come a very long way since the Tot-Guard, and it’s pretty remarkable just how safe modern child seats have become, and now even the idea of taking your kid on a car trip with no seat is enough to get you ostracized and your kid sent to pretty much anyone else. I’m not sure anything in the automotive industry has changed as much as the general attitude toward safety, so these past seeds of what would come are especially fascinating.
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“Tot Guard”
Is this good to guard my tater tots?
Wait…”get your own tots!”
I spent every family vacation riding on either the rear armrest or the pair of front armrests in my parents’ 1979 Lincoln Town Car. We got t-boned in Myrtle Beach while I was riding on the rear armrest between my two sisters. I flew face first into the dash and landed under the windshield. There was a lot of blood coming out of my mouth, but no permanent damage to my head.
I remember a guy at a service station using a crowbar to separate the rear panel from the rear wheel before we drove back to Virginia the same day. I still rode on the armrest (only way I could see out of that land yacht and it kept me out of the firing line of my sisters).
Well, to be fair to them, isn’t that exactly the same thing as the airbag in your steering wheel? You know, except 100% less FRAG GRENADE EXPLODING IN YOUR FACE.
According to family lore, in July of 1971, my parents bought a “car seat” for me and strapped it to the console between the front seats of their 1963 Impala SS. I am told that on a road trip, I started making a fuss and ended up kicking the transmission into reverse on the interstate. My dad jammed it back into drive, the Powerglide lived to shift another day, and I was strapped into the back seat from then on. The only casualty was my older brother, who got a bloody nose when he smashed into the back of the front seat…
So this sent me down an oldcarbrochures.org rabbit hole trying to find the most recent mention of the Tot-Guard which seems to have been in the back of all the Ford brochures well into the 1980s, and indeed they seem to have used the same picture from at least 1983 through 1988 (it may be from earlier still but they didn’t deign to show it in the car brochures, presumably consigning it to accessories pamphlets not archived at the abovementioned site) and mentioned it in text description through 1990.
It was sometime in the early ’80s I remember being yelled at pre-drive by an uncle for digging the seatbelt out of the “crack” between cushion and backrest where he had so artfully hid it. IIRC he’d had a couple of beers by then…
My parents always had a conversion van in the 80s so as toddlers / little kids I remember just flopping around in back on the bed never buckled in. The shag carpeting and overstuffed velour would have been like an airbag so all would have been OK.
Pff. In the 70’s we had metal car seats with their own ashtrays.
“Seat belts may be all right for adults, but try keeping a squirming five-year-old child buckled up for a long automobile ride. It cannot be done, short of resorting to chloroform.”
Who needs chloroform when there’s sun, dehydration, unburned hydrocarbons and boring AF AM talk radio? Sure those work a bit slower but they’re just as effective and free!
I used public radio. When one of my kids unbuckled, I switched the radio to classical music. They buckled back up quickly. They were also in carseats from birth., starting with the GM Infant Loveseat, (1971 & ’73) progressing to the Ford Totguard. My later kids (80 & 82) rode in the Strollee Wee Care. All were tested by Consumer Reports.
We were just thrown into the cargo hold with some blankets.
The truly amazing part of the “I’m in danger” meme is that it actually came from an episode of Family Guy and not The Simpsons
One thing I think a lot of people forget is that until the 1970s there were a lot of alternatives to having a car. Including walking.
The 1950s and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 really fucked up a lot of things, and one of the consequences of that was that since the doctor’s office or school was now six miles away and across three separate four lane 55MPH roads you couldn’t let Timmy walk to school anymore. School buses wouldn’t become more common until the early 1960s and wouldn’t become the default until the early 1970s, trolley service had died during World War II, and passenger rail would be dead by 1968.
And so what was the solution? Tie your kid down in the car like they were a rabid weasel and suffer their screaming for the ten minutes it took to get them to school before heading off to work for the day. Just like weasels children are very good at escaping restraints, and so the child seat was created so they couldn’t open the (safety latch-less) door and go tumbling out because school was boring and they wanted to spend the day making a lunar lander out of cardboard and discarded steel trashcans instead.
I broke the winshield of my parents oldsmobile with my skull once . This looks way safer than just a lap belt. Good for any parents that spent the extra money to get this.