According to car-safety.org, rear-facing is safest because it spreads “frontal crash forces over the whole area of a baby’s back, head and neck; they also prevent the head from snapping relative to the body in a frontal crash.” Additionally, the risk of broken legs due to bent knees or feet that touch the car’s seat is much lower than the risk of fatal injury. Crashtest.com cites these statistics for occurrence of crashes: frontal and frontal offset represent 72% of severe crashes, side impact 24% and rear and rear offset only account for 4%.