Image allegedly shows baby in car seat suspended outside vehicle. Is it real?

In summer 2026, people claimed a image spreading online was a vintage photo of a baby sitting in a car seat suspended outside the driver’s door:

(zadraaa accessed via Reddit)

In the example above, posted June 7, a Reddit user captioned (archived) the image, “A 1950s-style baby car seat, reminding us how far safety standards have come. Never leave a child in a hot car while you shop.”

The black-and-white image shows a baby suspended in a car seat outside the open window of the driver’s door of the vehicle. A house with a stoop and striped awnings is visible in the background.

Other users shared the picture on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Reddit (archived) and X (archived).

In short, the image is fake, generated using artificial intelligence. 

That said, genuine vintage photos do exist showing children sitting in external car seats hanging on the doors of parked cars.

Signs of AI in the fake car seat image

The fake car seat image displays numerous signs that generative AI was used to create it. The full-size version has an unusual crispness for photographs from the 1940s and ’50s.

As seen in a reflection on the the car’s body, the child appears to have three legs and feet (marked 1, 2 and 3 below):

Notice, too, that the car seat is padded on the child’s right side, but there appears to be no padding on the side closest to the car. Also, if the seat were removed from the door as configured and attached to a seat inside the car, the child would be facing left or right, not forward. Our research found only vintage car seats designed to face forward or backward. 

Speaking of facing forward, the full-size image shows the car parked perpendicular to the curb instead of parallel to it as would be more expected in a residential neighborhood.

The right side of the house in the background (as seen from the street) appears to have an odd mixture of brick and vinyl siding. Had the brick formed into a fireplace and chimney, that might make sense. However, there are windows on that wall, likely indicating no fireplace. (A Reddit user noted (archived) several of these signs of AI.)

Multiple scans of the image with the Google Gemini AI tool returned the same conclusion. Gemini detected the company’s invisible SynthID watermark, meaning someone used a Google-created AI tool to create the image: “My analysis of this image indicates that it contains a SynthID watermark, which means that most or all of the content was edited or generated with Google AI.”

A reverse image search failed to find any posts with the fake image prior to a March 2026 post (archived) on the Historical Image Facebook page, on which managers shared nothing but content labeled as AI-generated. Snopes messaged the page’s managers to ask for more information about the creation of the image. As of this writing, the page has posted no new content since June.

Real pictures of children in car seats suspended outside cars

Reverse image searches did locate similar images that were genuine, i.e., not created with AI or digitally edited.

For example, on Aug. 2, 2026, an Instagram user posted (archived) the fake image alongside an authentic photo showing a boy in a car seat suspended outside the door of a parked vehicle. The caption alleged, without evidence, that people would drive with the child unsafely attached outside the car to “enjoy the view during road trips.”

(@explaining.tech accessed via Instagram)

A popular Facebook post (archived) from 2021 showing the same genuine picture from the above post featured a user claiming, also without proof, that people would hook a child car seat outside on a car door to avoid leaving a child inside a hot car while adults shopped. 

(A house in the background features a striped awning similar to the AI-generated image. The Google AI tool that created the fake image potentially referenced this genuine photo.)

(American Hot Rodders Show accessed via Facebook)

The car seat in the authentic photo appears to match the Peterson car seat that appeared in a 1955 newspaper advertisement (archived). It cost $3.45.

(Stockton Record via Newspapers.com)

Another authentic picture, which appeared in a 2018 Reddit post (archived), also showed a young boy in a car seat hanging outside a car door. The caption reads, “Early model of a baby car seat.” There are others in the picture as well, including a young girl smiling, left, and what appear to be the shadows of two adults on the right side.

(H_G_Bells accessed via Reddit)

A 1945 newspaper ad (archived) displays an illustration of the same or a similar brand of car seat as that pictured immediately above, priced at $1.98. The ad reads in part, “This one slips right over the regular car seat back.”

(St. Louis Star Times via Newspapers.com)

Further reverse image searches located websites, for example vintag.es, hosting authentic vintage photos of children seated forward or backward, not left or right, in car seats inside cars.

How we located brands and illustrations

For readers interested in our research process, we found past car seat brands and the above-shown advertising illustrations via a path of online searches.

A Google search for the history of car seats led to an article mentioning the Bunny Bear company. A Newspapers.com search for “Bunny Bear,” with quotation marks, as well as the terms “car,” “seat” and “baby,” led us to a vintage ad (archived) mentioning the Rose Derry company. A Newspapers.com search for “Rose Derry” and “car seat” pointed to another vintage ad (archived) listing numerous children’s product brand names. Searches for those brands led to other leads, including the aforementioned car seat ads with illustrations, as well as numerous illustrated patents.

For further reading, we previously investigated alleged vintage photos showing babies in cagelike enclosures outside apartment-building windows.

Sources