On GOOD: Why Are Car Seats So Poorly Designed?

Photo from Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik (via GOOD)

My original title for this essay: Prisoners of the Car Seat. Because the poor design of the car seat isn’t just a problem for parents. It scales.

The difficulty of installing a car seat affects the market for car rentals, trains, planes, buses, and taxis. It is also hard to make it thorough childhood without purchasing three or more seats, and there are dire warnings against using a pre-owned one. If the United States is serious about moving away from fossil fuels and toward ride sharing, reuse, and public transportation, designers are going to have to solve the last mile problem … for parents. You got me on the train, now how do I get to grandma’s house?

Every time we plan a U.S. trip, the car seat becomes a major part of the conversation. Do we take ours, meaning we have to carry it, along with child, on the plane or train, install it in a strange car, vacation, tote it on the plane or train again, and reinstall in our car? Or do we take our chances at the other end with a rental car and a rental car seat—which is often dirty and, at an additional $10 per day, expensive? All cars don’t have the same belts and latches. All seats are not installed the same way. And the car rental attendants don’t help, because it is a liability issue. One tends to reach the conclusion that it would it be easier to drive, in your own car, leaving the seat in place.

Read the rest at GOOD: why parents aren’t going to embrace Zipcar, a plea for industrial designers, car companies and seat manufacturers to collaborate, and, because no design article seems complete without one, the sustainability argument.

Parents spend so much money on stuff we don’t need. A car seat is something we do need. So we keep buying them, even though they’re expensive, bulky, hard to install, and ugly to look at. Designers need to make them better. And then parents can make better transportation choices—for themselves and for the planet.

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By Alexandra Lange

Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and author, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism, awarded for her work as a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. She is currently the architecture critic for Curbed and has written extensively for Design Observer, Architect, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. Lange holds a PhD in 20th-century architecture history from New York University. Her writing often explores the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and design, with a focus on how the built environment shapes everyday life. She is also a recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, an honor she shares with Design Observer’s Editor-in-Chief, Ellen McGirt.