Insiders say it’s like a torture chamber. Its real name is the Structural Development Lab, located deep inside the Estes Engineering building in the sprawling General Motors Technical Center just outside Detroit in Warren, Michigan.
On this day, we’re given an exclusive look as two engineers place a pair of metal mockups of child safety seats inside a Cadillac Escalade body-in-white, attaching them to the seats, then hooking up cables to each mockup that run up and around cylinders.
In a moment the cylinders are placed into a slow motion, tightening the cables, placing stress on the child safety seat mockups. That stress is equivalent to the force that it might face in a frontal crash, explained David Santi, lead test engineer, regulatory at GM. See the video below.
Child safety seats have been proven to save lives. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates child seats saved 13,217 lives between 1968 and 2019.
They reduce the risk of fatal injury by up to 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers in passenger cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
However, child safety seats are only effective if they are installed correctly, and that’s a big problem. Almost half, 46% are not installed correctly, according to NHTSA.
In addition, if adult occupants do not buckle in, there’s a high probability children will not be properly restrained. In 2023, based on known restraint use, 64% of the children who died while riding with unrestrained passenger vehicle drivers were also unrestrained, according to NHTSA.
The stress test on the child safety seat mockups is a key element of the process GM uses to ensure that when customers attach child safety seats into their vehicles, they are secure, and children sitting in them are protected as much as possible.
But it’s a process that begins with using virtual tools early in a vehicle’s development that includes computer aided design and animation before even one physical part or prototype is built.
“Virtual tools do help us as a team, do more testing with our components and systems, and we evaluate those findings physically as required,” explained
“These tools for virtual also help us identify potential issues. So these tools are very assistive to us in terms of finding these issues very early on.”
It’s an extension of GM’s overall reliance on virtual tools adhering to a concept called finite element analysis.
Under that concept sections of every element in a vehicle, about five millimeters in size, are evaluated—as many as 20 or 30 million elements in all.
“Finite element analysis here at General Motors is we have taken our regulatory crash conditions, consumer metric crash conditions and our internal requirements and modeled all of those and what into what we call load cases,” explained Regina Carto, vice president, global product safety systems and certification. “So each of those load cases are analyzed over all of thosefinite element analysis to just so that we can know the performance. We can be very confident in the performance before a tool is even cut. So it saves time. It also provides a large body of knowledge that physical properties would take a lot of time and money to show.”
Critical to proper child safety seat installation are proper attachment mechanisms and controlling their movement to meet federal regulations.
Referring to the integrity of how a car seat would be attached and the integrity of that attachment at certain point, Sharath Varadappa, technical lead, seats, explains what he’s looking for using virtual tools.
“I can animate it and show how the stresses move, and I can predict failure,” said Varadappa. “Is it going to fail or not, or it’s going to pass, how robust these parts actually perform. So these are the things that we could do in the simulations.”
Indeed, while interior designers are considering the appearance and comfort of passenger seats, there are also considerations regarding compatibility with child safety seats. It’s an issue virtual tools are helping to solve not only for GM, but for companies that manufacture the safety seats.
There’s a regulatory requirement that requires angles of the seat need to be within a certain amount and that regulation is basically a bridge between the automaker and then child seat manufacturers, explained Tyler Jankowiak, technical seat comfort lead.
“So the child seat manufacturers need to know what, say, cushion angles to expect when they design their car seats,” said Jankowiak. Its all comes down to the bubble level that you’ll see in the car seats. So if a seat is not designed, the cushion is flat, instead of tilted like it’s supposed to be, you’re not going to be able to get the car seat leveled how it’s supposed to be. So it’s very important that our seats meet these angle requirements, both to just to pass regulations, but also we want to ensure that the occupants are safe, so we can test this virtually.”
Another virtual test is to determine if the seat attachment anchors built into the vehicle meet federal standards, pointed out Yuan Fang, senior seat comfort engineer.
There are three major metrics for the lower anchor—depth, attachment force and clearance angle.
“We basically use this tool to measure the depths for our virtual design seat. Then we get the attachment force,” explained Fang. “Then after that, we basically rotate the tool until it’s stopped by the seat back. Then we get a clearance angle. So this is entire procedure we use to assess our design way before we have the physical build seat.”
In the video below, Johansson demonstrates placement of a child safety seat, both front and rear facing, in a 2026 Chevrolet Traverse SUV.
From virtual design and testing, early prototypes of some parts can be fabricated in GM’s Additive Innovation Lab with 3D printers.
“They can’t be used for safety testing in this lab because the actual production grade intent material has to be used,” explained Morgan Hoffman, a manager at the lab. “However, we have many more technologies and materials. We’re able to 3D print a mold, for example, that we can be used to manufacture prototype or material that’s intended for production.”
But it all starts with virtual tools to help ensure safety is built into vehicles early in their development, to help save the lives of those who eventually ride in them, especially those who are just beginning their lives.
As Carto points out, safety can’t be an afterthought, declaring, “you can’t bolt safety on at the end.”