St. Petersburg, Florida -- For the first time, ratings are out for the car seat anchors that come built into cars to keep your kids safe. Parents and grandparents -- you will not be happy with the results.
A leading safety group tested more than a hundred vehicles, and only three came in with a "good" rating. More than half got a rating of either "marginal" or "poor."
It is absolutely fine and safe to use a car's seatbelt to install a child car seat. But the LATCH system of anchors and tethers is supposed to make it a snap to install a car seat the right way.
But that's not always the case, and these ratings make those problems really clear.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found nearly every car in America makes to too tough to actually find and use these anchors.
To be clear -- if you find and use the anchors at the bottom of the seat and the tether on the seat back -- they are all very safe. The new ratings are based on how easy they are for parents to see, get to, and actually hook up.
"LATCH hardware that is easy to use is more likely to result in a good tight installation," explained Jessica Jermakian, who worked on the ratings for the IIHS.
A good, tight installation is what makes sure the car seat does its job and protects your child.
Hard-to-find and hard-to-use car seat anchors are more than an issue of convenience, they're an issue of safety; most car seats used by kids in America right now aren't installed correctly.
One advocacy group says 96 percent of parents think they have their kid's seat installed properly. But in reality, only around 30 percent of them are doing it right. The consequences can be deadly.
In a poor-rated car like the Nissan Altima, the anchors are buried down in the crack of seat and take a lot of pressure to snap into. Ten vehicles ranked "poor".
On a good-rated car like the Volkswagen Passat, the LATCH anchors are easy to see and clip into.
The Passat is one of the three rides with a "good" rating. The others are the BMW 5 series and the Mercedes GL-Class.
You can see the whole list of new car seat anchor ratings from the IIHS here.
