It's the mid-1990s. Parents have been putting their kids in the front seat for decades, and now these new-fangled devices called airbags are forcing a change in habits. At first, airbags were thought to be dangerous only for infants in rear-facing child seats, but starting in late 1995, cases began to enter the public eye where children - too large for rear-facing car seats - were being killed by passenger airbags.
But what if children didn't have to be moved to the back seat, what if the child could be protected from airbag impact in the front? A company called XCSI filed a patent on a car seat designed to protect a child from airbag deployment on February 16, 1996. Basically, the car seat has an airbag of its own that fires in a crash, away from the child. This positions a strap to catch the car's airbag and redirect its deployment so that it inflates in the upper part of the occupant compartment, above the child's head.
It's unclear if the XCSI car seat was ever sold; I haven't been able to find a picture of one, so if they were sold to the public, it must have been briefly and in small numbers. Regardless, given the tremendous force that first-generation passenger airbags deployed, I have my doubts. Is there a way to make a car seat that makes it safe for a small child to be in the presence of a first-generation airbag? The world may never know, and with the newest first-generation airbags now nearing a quarter-century old, they have become a rarity. Modern advanced airbags have removed any reason to make such a device.
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