Associate
- Joined
- 15 Aug 2006
- Posts
- 1,764
- Location
- Leicester UK
Hi all,
I've noticed a few people lately saying that they are expecting babies and are factoring that into their car choices. I thought I'd knock together a fairly long-winded post about what I found about cars and car seats when I was looking at all this a few months ago. Then we can all have a jolly shout at one another about it in the usual Motors fashion
tl;dr - see bold text
Car Choices
We had two cars pre-baby. The first was a 08 3-door Ibiza 1.9 TDI and the second was an 02 Seat Leon 1.9 SE TDI. We thought that it made sense that the more expensive car should be the primary family car, so that it's fairly new, safe in a crash and good for holidays. Our criteria were:
The main problem we had was the boot. Every boot we looked at could fit the pushchair in diagonally but only the ones mentioned above would fit in straight down an edge. If this doesn't bother you then you can have pretty much any 4/5 door saloon/hatchback.
We hadn't really considered a 4x4 because all of the decent marques were out of budget for a decent example. The pre-facelift ML was horrible to drive and ridden with reliability issues. The XC90 is not a nice car at all, but is hugely practical and fairly cheap to run and holds its value because of this. The Q7 was (and still is) way out of budget. All of the jap 4x4s had awful interiors. Some look nice inside and out, but they are not great quality.
In the end we ended up with a 2004 BMW X5 3.0D SE Manual with 41,000 miles and FBMWSH for the Ibiza plus £1500. We knew the previous owner who was looking to trade the X5 in but was only being offered a pittance. The Ibiza on the other hand was getting unexpectedly high valuations for PX, so he said if we'd top up the value of the Ibiza to the value of his X5, he'd rather we have it than a dealer.
Car Seat Choices
Shopping for car seats or 'infant carriers' was a bit of a minefield. Being a man, the first thing to do is hit the internet, which mostly came up with women on baby forums wittering about the colour options. Which? did have a reasonably useful review, but only having one source is nigh on useless so I bought some magazines. If any of you have seen baby magazines yet, then you'll already know that they're less about journalism and writing and more about advertising whoever pays the most, being utterly non-committal in reviews and having a small section of 'Hello' Magazine quality.
First you need to decide whether your car seat will form part of a travel-system. These are pushchairs that can have the car seat clicked in place on top of them, so you don't need to wake baby if you go out and they fall asleep in the car. This needs to come first because it will limit your choice of car seats, but fortunately it seems to filter out a lot of the dross you're likely to find in the Argos catalogue.
The main ones to consider are: Maxi-Cosi CabrioFix, Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP, Recaro Young Profi Plus and the Britax Baby Safe Plus.
Maxi-Cosi CabrioFix
This has the best reviews and is compatible with the most different travel systems. It has a lightweight design but still looks and feels very sturdy. It's easy to fit by the belt only and ISOFix bases aren't too expensive for it.
Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP
This is a good car seat but is a piece heavier than the CabrioFix. It has a very sturdy design and also performed well in safety tests. Fitting these car seats using a belt only is usually very similar, so it was quite easy with this car seat but a swivelling belt clip on the back of the seat can make it a little fiddly. The ISOFix base is great and shows whether it is fixed to the car through a set of red indicators that turn green when it is secure. A second set of indicators show when the car seat is clicked onto the base securely, so you can see at a glance that its in safely. This is only compatible with the Mamas and Papas range of travel systems but obviously it can be bought and used as a standalone car seat.
Recaro Young Profi Plus
This is probably going to be the car seat of choice for most of us on here, just because of the brand! It is the safest car seat on the market and can be bought with an ISOFix base. If you are just buying a car seat without using a travel system, this is the one to get. Unfortunately it is only compatible with one or two Maclaren travel systems. The Maclaren systems are the lightest on the market, but we both thought they felt quite exposed and basic for a young baby. You might feel different, so it's definately worth a look.
Britax Baby Safe Plus
The Vauxhall of car seats. Its not bad, or expensive, or heavy, or unsafe but it just doesn't do it all as well as the Maxi-Cosi. It fits a few different travel systems, so if it comes with a system you like, then it's fine but I wouldn't look for a travel system specifically to fit this seat.
What we bought
We ended up with a Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP car seat. This was because we found the Pliko P3 Combination travel system was the best for our needs. It feels sturdy, folds down well, offers good protection and came with a hard bodied carry cot as well as the car seat, so if you're setting out from home, you can use it as a regular pram. It was the only credible jack-of-all-trades we could find.
Others that we looked at seriously were:
Mamas and Papas Pliko Pramette- Virtually identical to the P3 combination but the pushchair and carry cot were slightly less padded and didn't seem as confortable.
Gracco Vivo Travel System - Uses the Maxi Cosi car seat, and is very sturdy and easy to put up or fold away. Downsides for us were that it only folded in one dimension so it still had a large footprint when folded. Didn't come with any way of using as a pram.
Maclaren Techno XLR - Uses the Recaro Young Profi Plus car seat. This is one of the lightest models we tried and is one of the lightest on the market. It comes with a soft carry cot so you can use it as a pram. Downsides were that it didn't feel very padded, and because of its lightweight design, it felt quite basic, exposed and a little flimsy.
ISOFix
ISOFix was something I was keen to learn about from the start. After doing some reading I found that:
I've noticed a few people lately saying that they are expecting babies and are factoring that into their car choices. I thought I'd knock together a fairly long-winded post about what I found about cars and car seats when I was looking at all this a few months ago. Then we can all have a jolly shout at one another about it in the usual Motors fashion
tl;dr - see bold text
Car Choices
We had two cars pre-baby. The first was a 08 3-door Ibiza 1.9 TDI and the second was an 02 Seat Leon 1.9 SE TDI. We thought that it made sense that the more expensive car should be the primary family car, so that it's fairly new, safe in a crash and good for holidays. Our criteria were:
- Must be current model (unless the new model is very recent). Rather than set an arbitrary date for age, we wanted a newish design of car. That meant that while an 07 Mk3 Mondeo was out, an 06 Focus was potentially in. This meant that we weren't looking at designs that were 10+ years old in a 3 year old car.
- Must have ISOFix - more on why later
- Must return reasonable economy - just because the ibiza cost very little to run and we didn't want to resent filling up every other day when we've just had an expensive new addition to the household.
- Must be able to fit a pushchair straight down one edge. Either down the side or the along the back of the seats. The reason isn't just to make shopping easier, but also to be able to put a suitcase in the boot and be able to get at one or the other without having to unload everything.
- Budget - PX the ibiza + £1-2k
The main problem we had was the boot. Every boot we looked at could fit the pushchair in diagonally but only the ones mentioned above would fit in straight down an edge. If this doesn't bother you then you can have pretty much any 4/5 door saloon/hatchback.
We hadn't really considered a 4x4 because all of the decent marques were out of budget for a decent example. The pre-facelift ML was horrible to drive and ridden with reliability issues. The XC90 is not a nice car at all, but is hugely practical and fairly cheap to run and holds its value because of this. The Q7 was (and still is) way out of budget. All of the jap 4x4s had awful interiors. Some look nice inside and out, but they are not great quality.
In the end we ended up with a 2004 BMW X5 3.0D SE Manual with 41,000 miles and FBMWSH for the Ibiza plus £1500. We knew the previous owner who was looking to trade the X5 in but was only being offered a pittance. The Ibiza on the other hand was getting unexpectedly high valuations for PX, so he said if we'd top up the value of the Ibiza to the value of his X5, he'd rather we have it than a dealer.
Car Seat Choices
Shopping for car seats or 'infant carriers' was a bit of a minefield. Being a man, the first thing to do is hit the internet, which mostly came up with women on baby forums wittering about the colour options. Which? did have a reasonably useful review, but only having one source is nigh on useless so I bought some magazines. If any of you have seen baby magazines yet, then you'll already know that they're less about journalism and writing and more about advertising whoever pays the most, being utterly non-committal in reviews and having a small section of 'Hello' Magazine quality.
First you need to decide whether your car seat will form part of a travel-system. These are pushchairs that can have the car seat clicked in place on top of them, so you don't need to wake baby if you go out and they fall asleep in the car. This needs to come first because it will limit your choice of car seats, but fortunately it seems to filter out a lot of the dross you're likely to find in the Argos catalogue.
The main ones to consider are: Maxi-Cosi CabrioFix, Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP, Recaro Young Profi Plus and the Britax Baby Safe Plus.
Maxi-Cosi CabrioFix
This has the best reviews and is compatible with the most different travel systems. It has a lightweight design but still looks and feels very sturdy. It's easy to fit by the belt only and ISOFix bases aren't too expensive for it.
Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP
This is a good car seat but is a piece heavier than the CabrioFix. It has a very sturdy design and also performed well in safety tests. Fitting these car seats using a belt only is usually very similar, so it was quite easy with this car seat but a swivelling belt clip on the back of the seat can make it a little fiddly. The ISOFix base is great and shows whether it is fixed to the car through a set of red indicators that turn green when it is secure. A second set of indicators show when the car seat is clicked onto the base securely, so you can see at a glance that its in safely. This is only compatible with the Mamas and Papas range of travel systems but obviously it can be bought and used as a standalone car seat.
Recaro Young Profi Plus
This is probably going to be the car seat of choice for most of us on here, just because of the brand! It is the safest car seat on the market and can be bought with an ISOFix base. If you are just buying a car seat without using a travel system, this is the one to get. Unfortunately it is only compatible with one or two Maclaren travel systems. The Maclaren systems are the lightest on the market, but we both thought they felt quite exposed and basic for a young baby. You might feel different, so it's definately worth a look.
Britax Baby Safe Plus
The Vauxhall of car seats. Its not bad, or expensive, or heavy, or unsafe but it just doesn't do it all as well as the Maxi-Cosi. It fits a few different travel systems, so if it comes with a system you like, then it's fine but I wouldn't look for a travel system specifically to fit this seat.
What we bought
We ended up with a Mamas and Papas Primo Viaggio IP car seat. This was because we found the Pliko P3 Combination travel system was the best for our needs. It feels sturdy, folds down well, offers good protection and came with a hard bodied carry cot as well as the car seat, so if you're setting out from home, you can use it as a regular pram. It was the only credible jack-of-all-trades we could find.
Others that we looked at seriously were:
Mamas and Papas Pliko Pramette- Virtually identical to the P3 combination but the pushchair and carry cot were slightly less padded and didn't seem as confortable.
Gracco Vivo Travel System - Uses the Maxi Cosi car seat, and is very sturdy and easy to put up or fold away. Downsides for us were that it only folded in one dimension so it still had a large footprint when folded. Didn't come with any way of using as a pram.
Maclaren Techno XLR - Uses the Recaro Young Profi Plus car seat. This is one of the lightest models we tried and is one of the lightest on the market. It comes with a soft carry cot so you can use it as a pram. Downsides were that it didn't feel very padded, and because of its lightweight design, it felt quite basic, exposed and a little flimsy.
ISOFix
ISOFix was something I was keen to learn about from the start. After doing some reading I found that:
- Some places say its safer than a belt. It doesn't make the seat more effective in a crash but because its easier to fit and check that it's secure, it reduces the risk that its not fitted properly.
- It is easier to transfer the base to another car than to just use the belt on its own- its that easy to fit.
- It cuts down time spent putting the seat in from 2-3 minutes down to literally 10 seconds
- You aren't moving the seat much trying to get it in or out so you're less likely to wake the baby.
- It adds between £80 and £140 to the cost of you're travel system.
- The cost of ISOFix is easily worth every penny.
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
