Are Dog Car Seats Crash-Tested? What the Only Independent Test Found

Why there is nothing to certify against

Child car seats are regulated: a seat sold in the US has to meet a federal motor vehicle safety standard, and there is a defined test it must survive. Nothing equivalent exists for dogs. Dr. Flaura Winston, a physician-researcher at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, put it plainly when she wrote her own guidance for driving with dogs: there is “almost no scientific foundation for pet safety in cars in the peer-reviewed literature.”

So when a listing says crash-tested, ask three things: tested by whom, against what standard, with what result published. A company can crash a product, watch it fail, and still say it was tested. Without an independent lab and a readable result, the phrase carries no information.

What happened when someone actually ran the test

The Center for Pet Safety is a non-profit research organization that has run crash tests on pet harnesses, carriers, crates and travel seats. Its 2015 pilot study, funded by Subaru of America, took four small-dog travel seats chosen for high sales volume or for advertising that they had been crash-tested, secured each one according to the manufacturer’s own instructions, and crashed them with weighted test dogs.

Two things are worth holding onto. The failures were not exotic — a plastic buckle, a strap, a wire clip — and every one of them was in the part that connects the seat to the car. And this was a pilot study on four products a decade ago, not a survey of what is on sale today. It does not prove that every pet seat sold in 2026 fails. It proves the category was untested, that the first serious test found nothing that passed, and that nothing since has made passing a requirement.

One note on honesty. You will find a widely repeated pair of numbers about the force an unrestrained dog exerts in a crash — one figure for a ten-pound dog at 50 mph, another for an eighty-pound dog at 30 mph. They appear on hundreds of pages, almost always uncited, and we could not trace them to a published study or an agency. So we are not repeating them as fact. The physics is real; the specific figures are folklore until someone shows their work.

The risk that shows up far more often than a crash

Crash performance is the dramatic question. Distraction is the common one, and it is the part with real data behind it.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration defines distracted driving as “any activity that diverts attention from driving” and names talking to people in your vehicle as one of them. NHTSA reports that distracted driving claimed 3,208 lives in 2024 and injured 315,167 people that year. Its go-to illustration — five seconds with your eyes off the road is a football field at 55 mph — applies just as well to five seconds spent reaching back to push a dog off the console.

How often does that happen? In an AAA and Kurgo survey of 1,000 dog owners who had driven with their dog that year, 31 percent admitted being distracted by their dog while driving, 21 percent had let the dog sit in their lap, and only 17 percent used any restraint at all. The survey dates from 2010 and was co-run by a company that sells restraints, so treat the exact figures as a snapshot rather than a law of nature — but the shape of it matches what most drivers will recognize.

Winston’s framing is the useful one: a restraint does three separate jobs. Before a crash it keeps the dog from causing one. During a crash it keeps the dog attached to the car instead of loose inside it. After a crash it keeps a frightened dog from bolting out of a broken window into traffic, which is the failure mode most owners never think about.

What to do, in order of how much it actually helps

• Put the dog in the back. The ASPCA’s travel safety guidance is direct: if you skip the crate, “always keep them in the back seat in a harness attached to a secured seatbelt.” A dog in the front is in the path of an airbag designed for an adult human.
• Use a well-ventilated crate or carrier if the dog tolerates one. The ASPCA calls a crate “the safest option for your pet in case of an accident,” sized so the dog can stand, sit, lie down and turn around — and secured “so it will not slide or shift in the event of an abrupt stop.” An unsecured crate is cargo, not a restraint.
• Attach a harness, never a collar. Whatever the restraint, the load should go across the chest. A tether clipped to a neck collar concentrates force exactly where you least want it.
• Check the anchor, not the padding. Every CPS failure was in the connection. Look at how the product attaches to the car and ask whether that buckle is what you want between your dog and the windshield.
• Treat a booster seat as containment, not protection. A raised, strapped-in seat that keeps a small dog off your lap and out of the footwell does real work against distraction. That is a good reason to use one — and it is not the same claim as crash protection.
• Microchip and tag before the trip. The ASPCA recommends a microchip plus a collar tag with your phone number and a temporary travel tag with your destination number — cheap insurance against the post-crash bolt.

Is any of this the law?

There is no federal rule requiring you to restrain a dog in a car. Some states reach the same behavior indirectly — through distracted-driving statutes, obstruction-of-the-driver rules, or cruelty law covering dogs in open truck beds — and the details differ enough that any summary here would be wrong somewhere. NHTSA points drivers to their own state: “Your state legislature and governor make the laws regarding distracted driving.” Check your state’s DMV or highway safety office before a long drive, and check again for any state you drive through.

Choosing gear for the trip more broadly? Our guide to dog carriers for car travel covers shape and fit, and cat carriers for car trips does the same for cats, who mostly want a den rather than a view.

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