Put a 60-pound dog behind it, run into something immovable at 35 mph, and your pup will generate nearly three times that much force as it flies forward. To be sold in a car in the U.S., it must be capable of standing up to 1,000 pounds of force. Cars are designed for human, not canine occupants, so restraining a four-legged projectile is difficult. In it, I identified the main problem all of us dog owners face: in a 35-mile-per-hour crash, an unrestrained 60-pound dog becomes a projectile flying forwards with 2,700 pounds of force. Three years ago, I wrote an article about dog safety restraints, explaining how ineffective and problematic most of them are. It requires that the seats in your car be capable of withstanding a force applied forwards or backwards that’s equivalent to 20 times the weight of the seat itself, but allows for 40 degrees of seat deflection under that strain. That’s a problem because that force is static, not dynamic (equivalent to slowly pushing or pulling on the seat really hard), which fails to account for the incredibly rapid acceleration objects inside a vehicle experience in a crash. In the U.S., the regulation governing the strength of automotive seats is Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 207. And if you own a large dog, those seats will not be able to restrain them in a crash. The seats in your car probably aren’t as strong as you think.
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