A lawsuit has been filed against Artsana accusing the company of falsely claiming that its Chicco KidFit booster seats are safe for children weighing as little as 30 pounds and provide protection in side-impact crashes.
The suit, filed in September, focuses on the following seats: Chicco KidFit, KidFit 2-in-1, KidFit Zip Plus, KidFit Zip Air Plus, and the KidFit Adapt Plus Booster Seats.
According to the suit, experts have said for 20 years that booster seats are not safe for children weighing less than 40 pounds.
“As early as 2001, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (“NHTSA”) warned against the potential dangers of booster seat use by children weighing less than 40 pounds. According to NHTSA’s research, there is a 27% increased risk of moderate to fatal injuries for 3-to-4-year-olds when restrained in booster seats as compared to a fully-harnessed seat,” the suit filed by the law firm of Bursor & Fisher and Vozzolo.
And, last year, following a 10-month investigation into seven leading booster seat manufacturers, a Congressional subcommittee reached a damning conclusion:
“Artsana . . . deceptively marketed [its] booster seats with unsubstantiated claims about ‘safety features,’ while failing to disclose that those features have not been objectively shown to increase child safety.”
Its report went on to conclude that booster seat manufacturers including Artsana “endangered the lives of millions of American children and misled consumers about the safety of booster seats by failing to conduct appropriate side-impact testing, [and] deceiving consumers with false and misleading statements and material omissions about their side-impact testing protocols . . . and unsafely recommending that children under 40 pounds and as light as 30
pounds can use booster seats.”
“Despite the recent congressional findings and the decades-long consensus that booster seats are not safe for any child weighing less than 40 pounds, Artsana continued to market its Booster Seats as safe for children as small as 30 pounds, and as offering side-impact protection,” the suit says.
“In the absence of adequate federal regulation, Defendant ignored the prevailing safety knowledge and put profit over safety, making deceptive recommendations that mislead consumers into thinking its Products are safe for children as light as 30 pounds. Since their launch, Artsana has sold millions of Products and has likely earned hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.”
