Buckle up, baby.
Volvo Cars debuted a new concept for their luxury, family-friendly vehicles — a swivel child seat built into a console that sits where the front passenger seat would normally be.
A video released by Volvo shows how the seat is able to recline, which would allow the child to sleep, and how it can be moved forward and back to reveal storage.
“We started by asking ourselves if we could make life easier for parents and safer for their children when it comes to the child seat experience,” chief designer of Interiors Tisha Johnson said.
“We focused on three key benefits — making it easier to get the child into and out of the child seat from an ergonomic and comfort perspective, providing the child with a safe rearward facing seating position that enables it to keep eye-contact with either the driver or the rear passenger and of course including enough storage for those vital child accessories, such as diapers, bottles, wipes, and so on.”
The innovative car seat will be featured in Volvo’s XC90 Excellence model as part of its luxury “Lounge Console Concept.”
“For us the safety, convenience, and emotional factors outweigh everything else,” Johnson said. “Being able to maintain eye contact with your child from the rear seat , or being able to keep a bottle warm in the heated cup holders in the XC90 Excellence, would go a long way towards making life easier for parents taking their small child on a trip. Such alternative seating arrangements will become increasingly important as we move towards autonomous vehicles.”
The child seat concept could face issues in the U.S. where some states prohibit children from riding in the front seat.