Which reviews car seats

And so they should; the infant insert is made from merino wool to help keep cool in summer and snug in winter — and it feels the most premium of all the seats we tried.

This might not sound great, but as some bases are seriously pricey — as much as the seat itself — it is quite a good plan. The seat comes with smart lights, which automatically turn on to help guide you when locking the seat into the base or pram.

There are also interior lights, which illuminate your baby — great if you do a lot of nighttime driving and want to see what your baby is up to. The seat adapts well, with a lie-flat recline that adjusts in line with the headrest so your baby is always in the most comfortable position. The straps on this seat are nicely padded, and the seat is very deep — this might add to protection, but it was a bit tricky getting a wriggly baby from the depths of it.

We did find this seat fitted better in a bigger car, as you need 10cm between the seat and the seat in front. This German-designed infant car seat is the gold standard for infant car seats. The spacious seat is surprisingly lightweight, and the fabrics feel really durable without that utilitarian feel some other seats have.

The sunshade works independently of the handle, which is easy to flick between up, down and backwards positions. The cloud also has an almost lie-back position when out of the car, which means you can take your slumbering little bundle out of the car in it and leave them to snooze a little longer — or do the tricky car-seat-to-cot transfer a bit more easily.

You do have to have it upright in the car though. It needs to be used with the base to be classed as iSize. And as an added bonus the base is also compatible with the Cybex sirona Z iSize, when your baby outgrows their first seat. The safety spec on this seat is seriously impressive with extra side-impact protection, which you can easily pop out from the side on the door side.

Alternatively you can turn the seat when they reach 76cm and are older than 15 months the seat is suitable from birth. However this is a big seat, which will mean in smaller cars the seats have to be pushed really far forward to accommodate it. Another seat that covers all groups, this is an R44 seat ie.

What we did like were the side-impact protectors for extra reassurance, while our child was very keen on the sunshade that they could adjust themselves. Anything that keeps them busy on a car journey is a win for us. Moving it on again to group two was more fiddly because it involved removing the five-point harness straps, which were reluctant to be taken out. The seat is really easy to install. When installing the seat it required us to move the seat in front all the way forward and folded down to allow us the room to fit it.

There is additional side-impact protection, which you can adjust depending on how you have the seat installed this is a bit tricky to fit at first. The newborn mode is super cosy for little babies, and the recline function allows them to lie flat, more or less.

Adjusting the seat for the toddler stage was easy, and once in this mode the swivel function is easy to use and helps with straightforward loading of our child. Our child seemed extremely comfortable in this seat, and we felt really happy travelling even long distances with them in it — they seemed more than happy to snooze the journey away.

This seat is in the upper price range of the seats we tested, but we felt for the safety features and comfort factor it was still worthy of inclusion. Is it a car seat, is it a pram? This is a bit of a gamechanger of a product for us. It blew our minds. It is really well designed to make it convenient and easy to use.

When we used it in pram mode it was really easy to manoeuvre and push, and suited every height although the seat is quite low to the ground. This seat is brilliant for those who have limited boot space in their car, use public transport a lot or are off on their travels.

We found the seat really easy to install, mainly thanks to the YouTube video that showed us what to do. However, we found it breathtakingly frustrating to move it from group one to group two — the insert was really tricky and fiddly to remove, even for a highly practical person we had on hand to help. But once removed, our group two passenger seemed really comfy in the seat. This lightweight high-back booster seat suitable for children more than cm in height is brilliant for those who need to store seats away when not in use, or if you travel often, because it folds down and includes a carry handle.

It comes with an additional side-safety system, which easily clicks onto the door side of the seat, plus a nice padded safe pad to attach to the seat belt to provide extra chin and chest protection. Another high-back booster seat for children measuring cm, this seat will see your child through to the end of their car seat career hurrah! This is an iSize seat, so it carries all the extra safety features that give peace of mind and also includes additional side-impact protection.

We really liked the adjustable headrest, which cracks up using a dial on the side — much easier than tugging at the top of a head rest. The seat also comes with a pad that fits onto the seat belt and provides extra support for the neck and chin in a collision. Suitable for children aged from months to years, this seat offers great cost per use.

Instead of a five-point harness, this seat uses an impact shield up until they reach cm and 21kg. The impact shield buckles across their lap, which protects their abdomen. The seat is installed using Isofix points and a top tether, and we found it really easy to fit. Once your child graduates into high-back boosters, you can remove the impact shield and use the seat like any other booster.

That said, this is one of the most affordable and best value car seats around. It can be used rearward or forward facing and has five recline positions as well as added side impact protection for the head, body and hips.

Included in the price, however, is an ISOFIX base which should keep the car seat secure, and makes it easy to install and adjust. Buy now from Halfords. Norwegian company BeSafe produces some of the lightest products on the market and the iZi Modular child seat predictably comes in well under 10kg. Suitable from birth to around 4 years of age, the King II features advanced side and frontal protection.

Buy now from Britax. The Maxi Cosi Pearl follows on from the Pebble Plus infant seat and is suitable from approximately 6 months until 4 years of age.

It features a five-point harness which can be changed to a three-point seat belt as your child grows. It also has three recline positions, which can be adjusted with the child in the seat. It comes with a wide range of features, including a range of fully-retractable ISOFIX connection points, extra safety panels that fold into the seat when not in use, a headrest and harness system that adjust simultaneously and a harness hideaway that stores the 5-point harness out of sight when using as a Group seat.

Have you owned any of these child car seats? While the B-Safe lacks the clear, well-placed installation instructions like those on the KeyFit, we found it easier to click in and out of its base than that seat. If you already own an infant car seat and are looking for information on how to use it safely, read our section on car seat laws and safety concerns below. While researching this guide we interviewed 20 industry experts, safety authorities, and physicians, who detailed the most important safety and usability considerations for infant car seats.

We contacted current and former employees of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency responsible for vehicle and car seat safety. We hired MGA Research , a Wisconsin laboratory that runs much of the car seat crash testing in the country, to conduct front-impact and side-impact crash tests specifically for this story. We conducted interviews with representatives from seven leading car seat manufacturers, including product managers, engineers, and safety technicians.

We also spoke with car seat safety advocates, organizations that have argued both for and against a proposed side-impact standard, and leaders at the state level, such as Dr.

We also talked to scores of parents about their car seat experiences, scanned hundreds of Amazon reviews, and read dozens of articles from reputable publications and sites such as Consumer Reports, BabyGearLab , and Car Seats for the Littles.

Personally, I am familiar with government rules and regulations after spending almost a decade working on Capitol Hill and at the Department of Commerce. For this review, I traveled to Burlington, Wisconsin, to witness a team of engineers at MGA Research crash-test several top-rated infant car seats. Most hospitals, complying with the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines , do not discharge newborns until a staff member visually confirms the presence of a car seat to transport the baby safely home.

Several qualities distinguish infant car seats from larger convertible car seats , many of which have weight and height ranges that include most newborn infants. Most important, an infant seat is designed to be used only rear-facing, the position that is known to be far safer for small children. Unlike convertible car seats, infant seats also come with a detachable base, allowing parents to easily click the seat in and out of the vehicle and to carry the baby in the seat or attach it to a stroller.

Babies outgrow most infant car seats by the time they reach 30 or 32 inches tall or between 30 and 35 pounds, whichever comes first. The typical kid reaches that height range at 12 to 19 months and will be older than 3 by the time they weigh 35 pounds, so for most people the height limit is more relevant than the weight limit. Many of the parents we interviewed said they moved their child to a rear-facing convertible car seat far before the child officially outgrew their infant seat, typically when they felt the baby had become too heavy to carry in the bucket seat.

For travel, we recommend that parents use their existing infant car seat, without the base, and for parents who expect to travel quite a bit, or rely heavily on car-sharing services and want to have a single car seat and stroller combination, we recommend the Doona , a pick in our forthcoming guide to travel car seats. We started by researching the most popular infant car seats, about 30 models in all.

Proper installation is generally a far bigger problem for people than seat safety, so we searched the NHTSA ease-of-use installation database to determine which seats offer easy installation and come with clear instructions.

Our 20 total hours of background research helped us conclude that the ideal infant car seat should have several features and attributes. Using the above criteria, we narrowed the original list of 30 down to seven top infant car seats:. Zeroing in on these seats was not easy. Though some seats have higher safety marks than others, figuring out how much of a difference these small variations in the scores makes—if any—is a challenge, even for experts.

Ensuring consistent, proper installation and use is more likely to offer a safety edge than buying a seat that scored a sliver higher in a crash test. Also, many brands have multiple, similar infant car seat models, reflecting variations in height and weight limits or the addition of optional features such as push-button latches instead of the metal hooks found on less expensive seats , self-ratcheting latches that assist in creating tension for a tight install, a lock-off plate on the base to aid in seat belt installation as opposed to LATCH installation , or a no-rethread harness, which allows you to adjust the strap height from the front of the seat rather than having to turn it over and rethread the straps back through.

After extended discussions with experts, we concluded that most of those optional features are generally not necessary and not worth paying more for though we did find that a push-button latch was typically easier to use than a simple hook, particularly when uninstalling the base. We subjected our seven infant car seat finalists to a series of at-home tests that mimicked everyday use.

For each seat, we read and analyzed the instructions, practiced installing the seat with the base, using both the latches and a seat belt, as well as without the base , repeatedly adjusted the straps and handles, and evaluated the experience of clicking the seat in and out of its base.

We discovered through our research that, counterintuitively, more babies are injured in infant car seats when outside of the car than in car crashes themselves see our Care, use, and maintenance section below for more on proper car seat use.

The danger comes down to how balanced or tip-prone a seat is, so we attempted to determine if some seats were more susceptible than others to falls off tables, beds, or other raised surfaces by checking how much the seat moved when jostled. After running seven seats through these at-home ease-of-use and cleaning tests, we were able to narrow the field to four seats that we found were the easiest and most intuitive to use:. We know that federal authorities have been considering adding a side-impact test to their existing standards and upgrading the test bench they use for front-impact testing to a more modern model.

Both efforts are currently stalled. However, the proposed US standards exist, similar regulations have been in place in Europe and Australia for years, and many US manufacturers are already testing their seats to meet such standards. We decided to conduct tests that would reflect those proposed future standards. We commissioned MGA Research—an independent lab in Burlington, Wisconsin, that both government agencies and car seat manufacturers contract with—to carry out front-impact and side-impact testing on our four infant car seat finalists.

A study showed that side-impact crashes accounted for 40 percent of car-crash fatalities for children ages 5 and younger this figure included crashes that were considered unsurvivable as well as cases in which there was gross misuse of the car seat. Several key notes: The tests we commissioned MGA to conduct are not part of the current federal compliance standard. MGA conducted all our tests at its Burlington, Wisconsin, facility.

While we paid all the fees associated with the tests and went to observe the trials, only professionals from MGA conducted the seat preparation, testing, and analysis. In all cases, we used brand-new seats delivered directly to the Wisconsin facility and handled exclusively by MGA staff. An MGA technician installed each seat to the research testing bench, which then accelerated to between 28 and 30 mph before simulated impact.

Each crash test took only seconds and relied on a CRABI month-old dummy with three head-acceleration sensors and three chest-acceleration sensors attached to its urethane skin. On the first of two days of testing, the technicians subjected our four infant car seats to the front-crash testing, which resulted in three metrics: HIC head impact , G-clip chest impact , and maximum seat-back angle which measured how far the seat rotated forward during a crash. The second day, MGA put the four seats through the side-impact test, using the same CRABI month-old dummy without sensors and the bench model as outlined in the side-impact NPRM this bench model is different from the current and research frontal benches.

As is consistent with all crash-testing protocol, technicians manually dismantled and disposed of the seats after the tests. It fits kids up to 30 pounds or 30 inches—beyond the point most people want to use an infant seat.

The Chicco KeyFit 30 stands out from its peers in safety. The side of the Chicco base has a lock-off for a shoulder-belt installation, which you should use for the shoulder strap with seat belt installs in cars older than that do not have locking seat belts. A bubble indicator on either side of the Chicco base provides a straightforward, intuitive gauge for measuring the accurate seat angle.

The NHTSA awarded the Chicco KeyFit 30 four stars out of five for ease of installation; during our at-home testing experience, it was the easiest seat to install, and securing a tight fit took relatively little time or hand strength. In contrast to other car seats we tested, many of which use pictures, labels, or diagrams to explain installation, the Chicco KeyFit 30 was the easiest to figure out how to use, with little room for misunderstanding.

We also found the Chicco KeyFit 30 to be one of the easiest seats to click in and out of its base. The handle is easy to adjust, and the straps are simple to tighten and loosen. With the handle locked down in a triangle position, the seat is as stable as any other seat on an uneven surface, such as a bed or lawn. The Chicco KeyFit 30 is light at 9.

The synthetic material is a snap to clean—we easily wiped up any graham crackers or applesauce we spilled on the seat cover. The KeyFit 30 is compatible with our main stroller pick, the Baby Jogger City Mini 2 ; our upgrade pick, the Uppababy Cruz ; our jogging stroller picks, the Thule Urban Glide 2 and BOB Revolution Pro ; our budget travel stroller pick, the Mountain Buggy Nano ; and many others with the purchase of an adapter if not included with the stroller.

The KeyFit 30 comes in eight colors : parker beige , orion gray , moonstone light gray , iron black and gray , juneberry purple , nottingham heather gray , lilla polka dots , and oxford navy. The warranty is for one year, and the seat expiration is after six years. The Chicco KeyFit 30 can hold a child up to 30 inches tall or 30 pounds. Those limits are 2 inches shorter and 5 pounds lighter than the limits of several of the other seats we tested, notably the Britax B-Safe 35 and the Uppababy Mesa, which are each rated to 32 inches and 35 pounds.

Car seat technicians we spoke with agreed that a child is likely to reach the height limit of an infant seat before the weight limit. On a practical level, though the Chicco KeyFit 30 has a lower overall inch rating than competing seats, it may actually fit your child longer than a seat with a height limit a couple of inches higher.

Unlike other seats we tested, the Chicco KeyFit 30 does not have any of the options we identified as being enticing to parents but unnecessary, such as self-ratcheting latches a distinguishing feature on the Uppababy Mesa , a no-rethread harness, or central lock-off plates on the base. These features can add a level of convenience, but ultimately they are not required for a quality seat.

The European belt pass, which places the shoulder belt around the back of the seat in addition to across the top, is considered safer and works with seats such as the Cybex Aton 2 and Peg Perego Primo Viaggio you can find a helpful list from The Car Seat Lady.