Child car seats are essential for infant and toddler safety, but that doesn’t mean that parents are happy to use them. The seats are bulky and heavy, and they’re a pain to position correctly. But what if you could inflate a child seat once it was in position and then deflate it and stuff it into a bag when you’re finished? That could soon be a reality if Volvo’s new concept rear-facing child restraint makes it into production.
Car seats are not the most graceful of objects, but they are necessary. Wouldn’t it be nice if car seats could smoosh down to fit into a backpack? If Volvo ever produces its inflatable child car seat concept, that could very well be the case. Volvo filed for a patent for a rearward-facing inflatable child seat in 2012. The patent shares Volvo’s reasoning behind the idea: “A child seat should be easy to install and remove and have a weight as low as possible, since the adjustment and movement of heavy objects in general in a passenger car is extremely awkward.” A video presentation on the concept just recently emerged to give us a better idea of how it might work. It shows a button at the base of the seat that, when pressed, causes the whole thing to collapse down into a packable form in just 40 seconds. Inflating it back up into full form would take the same amount of time.
