Child Seat Cleat Install

We’re not sure why—perhaps it was a difference between design year for the vehicle and implementation year for the law—but the ’98 Toyota Rav4 didn’t come equipped with the rear safety cleat necessary to properly install a child seat in its back seat. Hmmm.


There was part of the provision for a child seat anchor designed into the floorpan of the Rav4, behind the second row of seats, but it was sitting out in the middle of the rear floor (the back-back?), a bit of an orphan. If you’ve seen pictures of Ayers Rock, you know what we’re talking about. Little mound of metal pressed into the floorpan, standing alone. It’s got to have some purpose, but what? Did Toyota actually intend for the hook to be there all the time? Did they anticipate the regulation that would prescribe the seat cleat? Was the spot in the back-back floor designed for something else altogether? Why no hook for the cleat, just the mounting point?


Some research at Toyota and in the factory manuals revealed that the safety restraint receiver needed for current-spec children’s seats was a dealership or consumer-installed option for the 1998 Toyota Rav4. (They use a strap that runs to the rear—the “top-strap”—with a big meaty spring hook on it to secure the child seat to a hard-point aft of the seat, like a safety strap.)


Though it was claimed by the factory that the trucklet would have bolts already welded into place in the rear floor and waiting for the top-strap bracket, there were none on this Rav4 - a hole would need to be drilled in the floor behind the back seats in the center of that raised section of metal, and an anchor (purchased from the dealership, supposedly) would be mounted there. Sounds a little Mickey Mouse for the Toyota factory. Hell, we can do Mickey Mouse at home.

Bracket and Bolt
So we had a bracket already. Go figure, it came out of the WRX parts box. So much good stuff comes from that box. Needless to say, there were a lot of leftovers. The passenger-side bracket had been in the ideal spot to mount our MiniDV camera when shooting video at the track, so we engineered a camera mount that bolted into the same hole where the top-strap bracket lived. Probably should have re-installed that when we sold the car… There was that bracket now, though, complete with the sexy high-strength steel bolt that held it in place. Hmmm, just to find a nut to match. Of course, there was one in the WRX box.

Hole in Floor
The location spec’d by Toyota for their floor-mounted child-seat retainer (should there have been one) was on either the right or left side of the cargo area floor, a raised section of the mild-steel floorpan that appeared to be a spot where two layers of steel were sandwiched together, strengthened for improved fatigue resistance and possible distortion or outright tearing during a high-load incident. We double-checked to be sure that the top-strap on the child seat reached it (we were pretty sure ours was long enough, but is yours?), and mocked up the two holes necessary before we began actually making them in a perfectly good Toyota.


The bracket we lifted from the Subaru would need two holes to secure it, one to take the through-bolt that was keeper’d to the strap retainer itself, another hole just aft of that to receive the small metal tang that sprouted from the back of the retainer to keep it pointed toward the front of the car. This was necessary to prevent it from rotating while unloaded and thusly making itself vulnerable to a snap-spin under load (during a crash) that could cause it to break.

Seal and Torque
The parts necessary were minimal, utterly. The bracket and nut/bolt combo came right out of the WRX and had been designed for this application, so we weren’t too worried about it being too weak for the job.