T
TJ-RV
Deleted User
I was curious what the child seating and restraint requirements are in the UK and how they translate to children in a motorhome. Here in California the law is both clear and confusing (quite normal for California law). A child under the age of 6 has to be restrained (in a child restraint seat with its own belts/harness), but cannot be in the front of a vehicle.
If you want to try to make sense of relevant CA law there's a synopsis Link Removed on the California DMV site (our equivalent to DVLA).
When we took our 4-year old grandson on a 2-week trip in our class A motorhome last year, I struggled with the potentially conflicting issues of how to do this safely and within the law. Apart from the driver and front passenger seats, the only other seating is the side-facing sofa, some loose dining chairs and a loose recliner.
The loose chairs obviously weren't going to work even if they had seatbelts (which they don't) and, although the sofa has seat belts, I didn't see them as much help in a front or rear collision, since this would be a sideways force on the child seat.
I eventually said to heck with interpreting the law and, in the interests of safety, put the child restraint seat (CRS) in the front passenger seat of the motorhome. There is no air bag on that side, and the seat is further back from the dashboard than the driver's seat. I used the lap seatbelt to anchor the child restraint seat, and used the strap from the CRS that goes over the back of the passenger seat. This strap wasn't actually long enough, and I added a motorcycle strap (the type that's used to anchor a motorcycle in the back of a pickup truck) to provide the rear restraint.
Class C motorhomes and some older class A's have fixed dinette seating (benches) with seatbelts. Although we don't think that these benches provide adequate restraint in an accident, they do appear to satisfy the law.
If you want to try to make sense of relevant CA law there's a synopsis Link Removed on the California DMV site (our equivalent to DVLA).
When we took our 4-year old grandson on a 2-week trip in our class A motorhome last year, I struggled with the potentially conflicting issues of how to do this safely and within the law. Apart from the driver and front passenger seats, the only other seating is the side-facing sofa, some loose dining chairs and a loose recliner.
The loose chairs obviously weren't going to work even if they had seatbelts (which they don't) and, although the sofa has seat belts, I didn't see them as much help in a front or rear collision, since this would be a sideways force on the child seat.
I eventually said to heck with interpreting the law and, in the interests of safety, put the child restraint seat (CRS) in the front passenger seat of the motorhome. There is no air bag on that side, and the seat is further back from the dashboard than the driver's seat. I used the lap seatbelt to anchor the child restraint seat, and used the strap from the CRS that goes over the back of the passenger seat. This strap wasn't actually long enough, and I added a motorcycle strap (the type that's used to anchor a motorcycle in the back of a pickup truck) to provide the rear restraint.
Class C motorhomes and some older class A's have fixed dinette seating (benches) with seatbelts. Although we don't think that these benches provide adequate restraint in an accident, they do appear to satisfy the law.
The last time I looked at our seatbelt laws, they seemed to suggest that people should be strapped into a suitable seatbelt whilst in the vehicle. If no suitable seatbelt was provided then they did not need to be restrained. I think the rulings on child restraints are a bit more conclusive, but not having access to young kids I have not read up on the laws (thank goodness 
)