[ars]

And I assume you will install and deinstall the carseat each time? A huge portion of cars are used to transport kids, and it's not practical to remove the carseat each time.

You can't have a car with a loaner carseats either since they have to be individually adjusted to the kid.

Every single time people talk about cars, and public transportation they always forget about kids. I see it over and over. Come on people - expand your worldview a little.

[dolbz]

I would expect that eventually the safety of automated cars will far exceed current levels and therefore child car seats won't be required in the same way that no-one uses a car seat on a train (or even a bus actually, which is presumably much more dangerous than a train)

[svnv]

This just opens the market up to build a carseat that solves this problem. How about a regular seat that can be folded out or transformed into a seat suitable for children?

[icebraining]

Where I live, a certain percentage of taxis have big trunks, for people with baggage (they can request that when they call for it).

Why not have a percentage of driverless cars pre-equipped with carseats? You'd just have to configure once the age of your kids, then when you call a car (using e.g. a smartphone app), you just say for who it is ("Siri, I need a car for john, mary and me") and the right type will come.

[ars]

The car seat needs to be individually adjusted, especially for younger kids (different heights needs the straps in different slots, although the fine tuning can often be done on the spot).

And you're going to need every combination of ages, people have more than one child.

There are approximately 10 different car seat configurations for the various age ranges (5 actual car seats). And assuming up to 3 kids would require 1000 different cars.

There is rear facing (with 3 heights), front facing strapped (4 heights), front facing buckled, booster, and booster without back. (Although many car seats can handle 2 types in one seat. But it requires you to reinstall it.)

[cbr]

     5 actual car seats

Are current parents really buying 5 car seats as their kid grows up?

[ars]

They buy 3 since virtually all can convert between two levels (any two adjacent levels). A rare (and expensive and heavy) few can do 3 levels in one.

But converting the seat requires rethreading the straps and other adjustments - it can take an hour to install some types if you are not familiar with it.

[ebrenes]

I'm not sure how it applies to other countries, but here at least you have to have special car seats for all children until they're aged 12. It's insane, but that's the fabulous new law they enacted. So, yeah in some cases, some parents really are buying that many seats.

[DennisP]

So people with kids buy a car, and rent it out when they're not planning to use it for a few hours.

[XLcommerce]

this doesn't sound like a show stopper to me... simply an opportunity for someone to invent a one-size-fits-all car seat :)

[ars]

Considering that there are 5 different types of car seats, and they can be adjusted to about 10 different configurations that's not going to be an easy task.

[sethg]

The people who design car seats these days know that their customers would rather spend an hour rethreading/reinstalling their car seat every six months than spend over $200 on the seat. But if there were a large fleet of shared cars on the road, and if some entrepreneur came out with a $1000 car seat that could be readjusted in seconds for a child of any size, then the owners of the fleet would have an incentive to loan out those seats along with the cars.