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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Considering what was available at the time, this was probably the best option. My parents loved me too much to confine me in a sissy cage. I got to stand up on the front seat. the front seat. the front seat.
Am I the only one that initially read the Jeenay ad as the second seat being for kids age “9 months to 41 years old”?
When you consider that the conventional child car seat in the 1960’s was something like what my parents put me in – when they even bothered:
baby-safety-seats-for-cars-in-the-1960s-both-advertise-to-v0-3axlz2rgfa4e1.jpg
..yeah – the Ford product was bounds and leaps better.
I had a harness and a leash so I was tethered but was able to walk around on the seat.
My claustrophobia is flaring up just by looking at it…
One of my earliest memories:
Dad’s ’54 Ford sedan, hanging both arms out the front passenger window, door spontaneously pops open just as the car approached a red light.
Left me dangling – my tiny cowboy boots skidding on the pavement through the last 8 or 10 ft of the stop.
Dad shouted a few choice commands (learnt a few new words that day) to let me know it was time to return to interior and shut the door.
I rode a Volkswagon Beetle door around a corner in a very similar situation.
Anyone else in the ’90s have one of these booster seats?
f7908d7858b96bd7ad680f0c0129ed65.jpg (640×480)
It looks pretty similar in concept to this Ford device. I was never in a car accident in it, but it did have a finnicky latch that even my mom struggled with a lot.
How did anyone survive? Silly question,
I had a molded yellow plastic booster seat like an “H” with an off-centered cross bar as the seating portion so it could be flipped over when the kid got a little taller. It let me see out the windshield of my mother’s Capri 1600 and I remember when several small birds flew into it, one leaving blood that streaked up the glass with the airflow and a few feathers stuck in it. Another one hit the header and I turned to see it tumbling down the rear window. As she tried to distract me from the gore, I remember saying, “That one is dead, too, mom.” I knew what dead meant when I was two, yet when teenagers kill, I’m supposed to believe they aren’t old enough to understand. I’m off track again! Anyway, I don’t even think the seat belt held the booster to the seat, though it’s quite far back to remember and I don’t recall ever asking to be here, so safety was never a major concern of mine. My first sister was born about four years later and had a more proper seat of some kind that I’m sure was still laughably bad, but I think it did buckle in, at least.
I wonder if people just had so many damn kids back then that, not only were they burnt out by constantly being subjected to so many of the things, but life just really wasn’t as precious with those numbers. Me and all the kids I knew were basically pushed outside in decent enough weather and told to not come back in until sunset.
My great-grandmother had 22 kids and I wonder if that generational trauma is part reason I have never had the slightest interest.
This would have roughly the same effect as running full sprint into a gym mat attached to a brick wall. It’s still gonna break your face. Not that I would know.
Nope.
Not me.
Torch, please look this one up- the December 1956 motortrend. Page 39. Last 2 paragraphs is where fords best child safety innovation is.
You’ll have a nice impression of your child’s face in a piece of plastic to remember them by.
I love that little seat in the Frogeye Sprite. Haven’t seen that before. It would be great for a little dog. I kind of want one now, and a little dog to ride on it too.
The Tot-Guard looks suspiciously like an upsized Play-Doh Fun Factory. Wonder if it also came with cutters so you could extrude your kid in shapes like stars, butterflies, cats, dolphins, and more.
Wow, I remember seeing those in the back of Ford brochures in the late 80s and early 90s! Weird that it lasted so long.
Just came to say this, amazing that Ford was touting them in factory brochures through at least the late ’80s.
Better than my idea. I was alway annoyed at how bulky and unwieldy car seats were. What if we placed them in an egg frame towed behind the vehicle, covered the outside in crumple zones, and strapped them in so that it was tumble proof?
I’m more fascinated about what’s gonna happen when a kid pukes in that thing. It’s like a vomit-to-lap diverting device.
Ugh, actually the first thing I thought when I saw it and I don’t even have kids!
Honestly I’d rather have that than all over my Rich Corinthian Leather.
If a little kid vomits, anyone they’ve ever met gets some on their lap. This vomit funnel would be immaterial.
At least they didn’t puke in my car.
Mission Accomplished!
I was thinking how many kids pissed themselves in it, because they refused to go before leaving the house, waited until it was a down-to-the-wire emergency to say anything in the car, and that thing looks like it would be a bit more cumbersome to remove than simply unfastening a belt restraint
Now that you mention it, it does look like a urinal.
It’s a five pound piece of blow-molded plastic. I’d imagine that you could rock it forward a bit and lift the kid out the top. Or just unbuckle it and throw it forward.
I distinctly remember a conversation between my parents about me standing in the front footwell with my chin on the dash of our 73 Impala.
My mom asked if it was safe and my father’s response was “Yes, if we have an accident he won’t have as far to fly to hit the padded dash.
I have a handful of very early childhood memories including a few occasions in which I would teethe on the curved edge of the padded dash in my parents’ ’67 LeSabre as we drove along. Fortunately I not only survived but also turned out to be perfectly normal.
I remember going to get ice cream as a family in my dad’s Ford Ranger, 4 people in a truck with a 3 person bench, so my mom would sit in the passenger foot well. Only did that a couple times, she thought it was more fun than taking their Tempo, but they realized it was a dumb idea, like many things people do in their 20s, I suppose