Child car seats and accessories
A child car seat holds the child in the place that is theirs in the car, and its accessories cover the anchoring, keeping an eye on the child and the protection of the upholstery. The deciding factors are the approval label and the child's height in centimetres, not age and not a guess based on weight. Rotating models from 40 to 150 centimetres attach with isofix and are secured with a support leg or a top tether. Rear-facing, a child never travels in the front seat with an active airbag.
Child car seats and accessories
A child car seat is the one place in the car where a child comes out of a crash without serious injury, and the accessories back that job up. The category covers the seats and booster seats themselves, parts for anchoring and fitting, harnesses and holding the child in place, mirrors for watching and protective mats to go under the seat. What sells most are the rotating models for 40 to 150 centimetres, because they cover the whole stretch from the maternity ward to the booster. Every model comes with a list of the cars it fits, and that list is worth reading before the colour of the cover.
Before buying you read the approval label, the orange sticker on the side of the seat with the number of the regulation. The R129 standard, known as i-Size, sorts seats by the child's height in centimetres and has replaced the older R44/04, which shops in the European Union have not been allowed to sell new since September 2024. A seat to R44/04 you may keep using to the end of its service life, but do not buy a new one. A backless booster is only approved under R129 from 125 centimetres and 22 kilos, and until then the child belongs in a seat with a backrest.
The seat attaches in the car with isofix and a support leg or with the top tether, which hooks into the eyelet behind the backrest. The support leg never rests on the lid of a floor storage compartment, because in a crash it drops through into the compartment. If the car has no isofix, look for a model that can also be strapped in with the seat belt and check that the belt is long enough. A correctly fitted seat moves sideways at its base by two centimetres at most.
The five-point harness runs over both shoulders, across the hips and between the legs, and spreads the crash across the hard parts of the body. In a rear-facing seat the shoulder straps sit at shoulder height or just below, in a forward-facing seat exactly the other way round, at shoulder height or just above. A thick winter coat has no place under the harness, because in a crash it flattens and slack opens up between the strap and the child. The tension is checked with your fingers on the shoulder strap by the collarbone, and you must not be able to pinch the strap into a fold.
Rear-facing, a child must not sit in the front seat with an active airbag, and up to fifteen months rear-facing travel is compulsory in the back as well. The mirror for watching the child has to be pulled tight against the headrest, or it flies through the cabin under braking. The protective mat under the seat may only be thin, so that it neither changes the angle of the seat nor gets in the way of the isofix arms.