would you put your child in row three of an SUV or a people mover - if you knew the vehicle did not have head-protecting side airbags in that row? And how would you even know if it had that? I just carved up the market - 20 seven-seat SUVs and four people movers … and the row-three protection offerings might surprise you.  

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This week I went through the somewhat laborious process of figuring which vehicles had the airbags in row three.   In people movers, Kia Carnival, Toyota Granvia and Honda Odyssey get big ticks for row three protection (and row four as well in the case of the four-row Toyota). But the LDV G10 does not - nor does it offer that side protection in row one or two - which goes some way to explaining its pathetic three-star rating.  Among seven-seat SUVs, MU-X, Fortuner and Everest manage to offer that row three protection, while Pajero Sport does not. I’m lumping them together because they’re all essentially converted dual-cab utes.  Landcruiser 200 also offers you that side protection, as does Prado, Kluger and Nissan Pathfinder, but I cannot tell you about Pajero or Patrol, because ANCAP’s evaluations there are hopelessly outdated and the technical reports do not include this information.  LDV D90 - yes, for row three. Also in the ‘Yes’ column are Honda CR-V, Mazda CX-8 and CX-9.   The entrants which either fail to offer this protection, or offer it only partially, are X-TRAIL, Outlander, Santa Fe, Sorento, Ford Endura, and SsangYong Korando - but I cannot tell you about the Rexton because it has not been tested by ANCAP.  Before I let you go on this: I honestly cannot tell you if this is a meaningful metric about whether or not to buy a particular vehicle. Like: does it make sense not to buy a vehicle if it lacks this protection? In isolation: it’s probably a poor way to choose a vehicle.  I don’t know how many people actually die or are injured in row three - and I don’t know the modality of their injuries. I can tell you only 27 children aged from newborn to 16 died on the road in the six months from April to September this year. (Clearly, they weren’t all sitting in row three - some were probably pedestrians, and some were probably the victims of parental incompetence - such as failing to be restrained by drunk parents, or somesuch.)  Transport injuries - which is not just cars, but is probably mainly cars - hospitalises about 19,000 kids a year. (In perspective, falls are roughly double that, and ‘other’ is the largest official category of child injuries - at about 50,000 annually.)   I’d also want to know if side impact injury is even a major thing in row three - because if the modality of injury is mainly rear-enders, we’d clearly be better off focussing on structural protection and controlled crumpling to the rear, huh? It may well be that side curtain protection is something of a sideshow for row three. In the absence of data, how would you know?