What to expect during a AAA car seat inspection

Being a first-time mom, one of the firsts for me is personally installing the Diono Radian 3QXT convertible car seat. I'm not sure if I've followed the installation instructions (in the manual and in the video resources) to a T so I had a car seat inspection appointment scheduled with AAA, my family's motor vehicle insurance provider. I now write about the experience of going through one.

I think that child restraint inspections are typically conducted in person but because of COVID-19, every meeting is conducted virtually these days. For this particular session, we met using Google Meet rather than via Zoom.

Before the car seat inspection, I had transferred the car seat from the right passenger seat to the middle seat in the back row. Several reasons:

• It is the only location in the car that will never be directly hit in the event of a collision (i.e., head-on, side, or rear-end collision). 
• The child passenger has no access to the vehicle's door closest to him/her.
• The rear-facing mode of the car seat is a legroom hog, effectively eating up the front passenger seat's legroom if the car seat is right behind it.

Diono Radian 3QXT installed rear-facing in the middle seat

Based on my experience, what should we expect during a AAA car seat inspection?

In my case, I was asked about the car's make and model and the car seat's make, model, and date of manufacture. For the Radian 3QXT, these pieces of information can be found on a sticker found at the back of the car seat. Ann, the child passenger safety technician, used these data to find out if recalls have been made for this particular model; if so, to determine if the unit I have installed is affected by the recall. The Radian 3QXT has only been released this year and has seen the light of day a total of five times, to date. She also asked if the car seat had been involved in any road mishaps (which it hasn't).

Ann had me check out the text in the stickers on the side of the car seat to help me know where to quickly find the information I needed without checking the manual. We discussed weight and height limits for the three modes of the Radian 3QXT: rear-facing (the mode I'm using now), forward-facing (which I intend to use not in the near future), and booster (for grade-schoolers typically). Don't get me wrong; we checked the manual for information, too. 

We went through the seatbelt installation to see if I needed to correct it. Note that I'm using the car's seatbelt now rather than the SuperLATCH system. The middle seat doesn't have the lower anchors and I don't think I'm allowed to "borrow"  the lower anchors of the passenger seats by the windows; these are reasons why I opted to do a seatbelt install. The '07 MB C230 has a seatbelt type whose locking mechanism is triggered after the seatbelt has fully been pulled and the slack of the shoulder belt has been removed. I learned a trick from the Instagram account @safeintheseat, in which Michelle, the car seat expert mentioned that tightening the seatbelt should be done from the buckle side. With these pieces of information about the seatbelt install, I was able to secure the Radian 3QXT snugly enough to pass Ann's standards for safety.

My son was present at some point in the inspection and was strapped in the car seat. Thus, rather than using a stuffed to practice on, Ann and I used my son as the subject in the harness-use walk-through. Ann taught me how to perform the "pinch test" to evaluate the tightness of the harness straps. She also reminded me to check my son’s shoulder height and make sure that the harness straps are in their right positions based on my son’s height.

As we ended the call, Ann discussed potential in-car projectiles that may endanger us in the event of an accident. I was just reading up on how safely stow handbags, water bottles, and mobile phones (among the many loose items in the car). Before the inspection, I already removed a loose trash bin and closed the coin box (actually, I think it’s an ash tray but my family uses it to store coins). After the inspection, I checked again to see if I had missed anything. I’m also going to get some tethered bags to act as storage for handbags and as trash bins. 

It was great to meet Ann and see that my installation was good, coming from a professional. Now, I hope the COVID-19 pandemic ends soon so I can take my son out more.