Does anybody know the answer to a seatbelt problem in a 300tdi five door ES discovery. the problem is the rear seatbelts are not long enough to go round rear facing newborn child seats. The seats can not be fitted in the front as the vehicle has air bags. Landrovers answer is that you cant fit these seats but as this is supposed to be a family vehical i find this unbelievable. any answers will be gratefully recieved. Dean
Some seats will fit, but they are only just...
Britax Eclipse Si certainly does but it's forward facing. We had an M&P travel system before that, which was rear facing and it JUST fit with zero slack. Best bet is to take the truck to Halfords, Mothercare or whoever and try before you buy. You will be limited!
FWIW, Mandy's old Ford Escort had the same trouble - half the seats in M&P were counted out by that. The newer cars seem to have longer belts.
You could try to source a small extension belt (sort of female to male) about 2 inches long - could give you just the extra you need without getting in the way of the way the belt loops.
Another option (and the route I almost took), remove the seat belt and put a longer one in!
You could try to source a lap-only car seat, but I think these are only available for forward-facing. My Britax allows lap only (which means I can carry Charlotte in the 101 and Series 2 (when Mandy isn't looking...).
Forward-facing seats inherently need less belt, but are no use until Junior is at least a year old. Don't go by the age, BTW, neck strength is the most important factor and varies a lot from infant to infant. OOI, Volvo don't sell forward facing seats at all!
Good luck.
If you find one that fits it might be worth adding to the FAQ as a useful reference. Phil....
I had similar problems, afraid the only answer i could find was to get a different seat that did fit..
In all other cars I have come across with passenger side airbags it has been possible to disable them (usually with the ignition key) to deal with these circumstances and also for when you are transporting adults who are too short for the airbag to operate safely.
Lizzy
when we had our range rover the seats we tried from halfords didnt and we ended up going to a government road safety place and trying loads of seats until we found one that fitted.
Notable exception being Mercedes. The only way to disable the passenger airbag in one of those is to fit the Mercedes seat, which has a radio transponder to disable the airbag.
We tried Charlotte in the front a couple of times, but frankly it was dangerous. With her rear facing I spent more time looking at her than looking at the road...
On or around Tue, 31 Aug 2004 18:08:37 +0100, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:
probably the best option. I daresay a front one will fit. The you can carry lardarse passengers in the back seat too.
On or around Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:22:01 +0100, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:
'course, you could disable the airbag by setting it off and not replacing the f***er.
I really don't see the point of the sods, if you have compulsory belts and compulsory wearing of belts, as you do in this country. AIUI, the airbag was developed for countries with no compulsory belt law as a means of protecting those who're too dense to protect themselves (OK, OK, I know, someone will come along now with some medical condition which precludes the wearing of a seatbelt).
In message , Austin Shackles writes
No, airbags were initially developed as an alternative to seat belts but it was found that on their own they could easily do more harm than good so were abandoned. Then someone had another look using the airbag in conjunction with a seat belt and found that overcame the major problems.
On or around Wed, 1 Sep 2004 17:39:59 +0100, hugh enlightened us thusly:
but does it offer all that much benefit, when used with a properly-functional inertia reel belt or other similar harness? I can see the advantage if you just have lap belts, but the whole point of the chest belt is to stop you coming into contact with the hard-ish bits at the front of the vehicle.
I've seen some pretty heated and long-running arguments on Usenet about this. American standards seem to require rather more energetic deployment, reputedly because there was no general wear-a-seatbelt law.
Steering wheel airbags are much more likely to reduce injury than others. Watch one of those films of crash-test dummies, and you'll see there is considerable upper-body movement, even with belts. Note that F1 cars don't have airbags, and have a totally different seatbelt system.
I recall being told that the full set of airbags in some cars requires more different pyrotechnics to fire than an ejector seat has fitted.
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