The Best Infant Car Seat

How We Found the Best Infant Car Seat

While the best infant car seat is — of course — the safest, it should also make parents’ lives more convenient and the first months of an infant’s life more restful. To find out which infant car seats truly make life with a newborn safer and simpler, we asked child passenger safety technicians and pediatricians to weigh in.

Every infant car seat is safe, as long as it’s used correctly.

Priority number one for any parent buying an infant car seat is their newborn’s safety. And in the words of Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, Chairperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention, “Car seat manufacturers aren’t in the business of putting kids at risk.” In fact, every car seat on the market has been rigorously tested and certified by its manufacturer to ensure it meets federal safety standards when it’s installed correctly.

But here’s the catch: That level of safety is only maintained if a seat is installed correctly. And it’s easy to make mistakes during installation. Studies have found that up to 95 percent of parents misuse their car seat, putting their children at risk. The only way to know you’ve installed your car seat safely is by bringing it to a licensed Child Passenger Safety Technician for an inspection. But there are car seats that make it easier to avoid the two most common mistakes: harness/chest-clip adjustment errors and incorrect installation.

So, we looked for the seats that are easiest to use.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) keeps an ear to the ground for the most popular car seats and performs comprehensive ease-of-use tests on each one, using a five-star rating system in four categories: labeling, instructions, securing the child, and vehicle installation features. Then it takes those categorical scores and assigns each seat an overall ease-of-use rating from one (“poor”) to five (“excellent”).

The best car seats give parents the best tools to keep their child safe, so we only considered seats that received above-average scores for overall ease-of-use and in the areas parents most commonly make mistakes (installation and securing the child). That gave us 18 above-average seats. Some brands had several car seats on the list — kudos to you, Baby Trend, Britax, Cybex, Chicco, and Graco. When looking at multiple seats within one brand, we gave preference to the ones that earned higher ratings from Consumer Reports and NHTSA.

We did cut one brand, Combi, altogether when we saw this on the Combi Shuttle’s product page: “WARNING: This product contains ‘TDCPP’, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer." (Yikes.) TDCPP, a type of flame retardant, is a known carcinogen. Save for the UPPAbaby MESA, every car seat on the market contains some kind of chemical flame retardant — but TDCPP doesn’t stay in the foam or fabric of a seat — it's released over time and can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin. With so many other options to choose from, we decided to play it safe.

Perhaps the most intriguing discovery was with the Chicco KeyFit versus the KeyFit 30. The only spec difference between those two seats is the weight limit (the KeyFit’s is 22 pounds, while the KeyFit 30’s is — you guessed it — 30). According to the CDC's infant growth charts, boys at the 50th percentile for height and weight reach the height limit of both seats (30 inches) within a month of reaching 22 pounds. And the girls in the 50th percentile reach 22 pounds and 30 inches almost simultaneously. Best case scenario: Depending on how quickly your child grows, you maybe get an extra month or two of use out of it before you have to switch to a convertible car seat. We went with the cheaper option.

From there, we were left with 11 best-in-class seats, ranging from $170 to $500. To find our top pick, we knew we needed to bring in the perspective of the people who use the seats on a daily basis: parents and caretakers.

Then we put our finalists to the test.

To find out what car seat characteristics make a difference in daily convenience, we surveyed over a hundred people who’ve recently purchased a car seat, asking them about what mattered most. Nearly all our respondents prioritized ease of securing a child and ease of detaching the infant carrier from its base. Beyond that, parents cared most about the comfort of using a seat’s carrier and the comfort of their child.

With those priorities in mind, we took a deep dive into each seat's specs and features to find out which would be the easiest to use every day.

Its buckles and clips should make it easy to secure your child.

Securing your infant in a car seat means buckling a harness and a chest clip, and getting the straps tight enough to keep a baby safe — sounds simple enough, until you add the squirming baby. Some seats simplify the process with clips, buckles, and straps that are intuitive to use and leave the parent or caretaker confident that their baby is secure. To find out which of our top picks did this best, we went through several cycles of loosening and tightening all the seats’ harness straps, then unbuckling and buckling each harness and chest clip.

Most seats’ harness adjustment features were smooth and simple, making small issues like the Maxi-Cosi Mico Max 30’s concealed harness release lever feel like big hassles. Poking around for a lever underneath its cushioning felt like an unnecessary amount of work for something we’d use every day. Testers raised another red flag while adjusting phil&teds Alpha’s harness, which made a disconcerting velcro-stripping noise if loosened too far. Tightening it back up was even worse — no matter how gently we pulled on the straps, they would suddenly retract.

While buckling and unbuckling harnesses and chest clips, testers found that the best hardware came together securely with a snappy *click* and unbuckled with just the right amount of effort: Not so little that it might come unbuckled accidentally, but not so much that they had to fight with the hardware.

Most crotch buckle secure in an identical fashion, with two metal male pieces that can click smoothly and securely into a square buckle. The Baby Trend Inertia was the only seat we tested that didn’t have that standard hardware; we were confounded by the Inertia’s plastic, overlapping puzzle-piece male prongs that have to be perfectly aligned before they’re inserted. Cue images of crying babies while parents fumble with the pieces. It didn’t make sense to our testers, given how quick and easy all the other harnesses were to operate.

Testers preferred the Chicco's standard buckle design (right) over The Baby Trend Inertia's interlocking puzzle-pieces (left).

Harness clips were more distinct. Some had a button to press and slide to unclip, or a pronged pinching mechanism, like the chin strap clip on a bike helmet. Regardless of clip design, many of the seats fell in the sweet spot. Testers thought it felt secure, but would also be comfortable using the hardware daily.

Again, the phil&teds fell short. It lacked the comforting *click*; we had to pull on the straps to make sure it actually latched. The Britax B-Safe Elite clip, on the other hand, felt glued together. And while the Graco didn’t take super strength to unbuckle, it took dexterity and just the right angle to gain leverage; testers felt like it would get annoying to deal with day-in and day-out.

It should transition from car seat to carrier and back again, seamlessly.

Dr. Hoffman told us one of the the first rules of pediatrics is “Never wake a sleeping baby." That’s the most common reason parents buy a rear-facing-only infant car seat, rather than a convertible car seat, for their newborns: The detachable carrier allows for a smooth transition from car to carry (or stroller). To get a feel for what makes some carriers easier to use than others, we loaded 8- and 15-pound weights into each carrier, then attached and reattached the seats from their bases. The top performers were so smooth, we wouldn't have to worry about jostling baby awake when moving them in or out of the car.

Our testers noticed that infant car seats with release handles on their carriers, rather than on their bases, allowed them to detach the carrier and get it into optimum carrying position in one motion, while seats with release handles on their bases required more finesse and strategy.

Simple releases like the ones on our top pick UPPAbaby and Chicco seats streamlined the experience and made testers feel like the carrier was in it to help them, not make things more difficult. By comparison, attaching and detaching the Nuna Pipa was awkward and clunky. Pulling the Pipa’s release handle caused halting vibrations that reminded testers of a grinding gear or bicycle chain. Our smallest testers were forced to lean in and “hug” the whole carrier in order to unload it; that’s not exactly ideal for, say, getting your carrier out while parked in a tight space.

Then we got to the Doona Infant Car Seat Stroller. You read that right, it’s a magic car seat that turns into a carrier and a stroller. The Doona is a neat idea, in concept, given it’s supposed to function as a self-contained travel system. Even with the instructions we struggled to show the parent testers how to make the magic happen. When we finally did, we expected fireworks and got crickets. Parents were mostly at a loss as to how this seat would make their lives more convenient. Testers disliked how low the stroller was to the ground and no one like lifting the heavy (16.5 pounds) carrier, even when it was empty. They agreed that a separate stroller with lightweight carrier were more versatile. We heard their message loud and clear.

The carrier needed to be light enough to actually carry.

The comfort of carrying a detached carrier comes down to four factors: Its weight, handle, dimensions, and balance. With baby-sized weights in tow, we asked parents to detach and carry the carriers and give us their thoughts. In truth, all testers found any carrier to be pretty annoying to carry, found nearly every handle “just fine,” and most already came in jaded about the concept of carrying a carrier at all. But weight became the one dividing factor.

The detached carriers’ weights ranged from 8.3 (phil&teds Alpha) to 16.5 (the Doona) pounds. Carrier weight can be a priority for car-seat shopping parents, depending on where they see themselves using it most. Someone who lives in a three-story walk-up is going to notice those extra pounds a lot more than someone who lives in a house with an attached garage, for example.

While our testers didn’t notice weight differences among seats within a pound of each other, they easily picked out the three heaviest seats: the Britax B-Safe Elite, Cybex Aton Q, and Doona, all of which are over 11 pounds when detached. The Doona’s extra weight makes sense, since it has wheels and stroller hardware attached to its carrier. The Britax and Cybex are likely heavier due to their no-rethread harness hardware — a feature that helps you adjust the seat as your child grows. Normally, you'd need to remove the seat cover, pull the harness straps through the slots in the back of the seat, then rethread the harness back through at the correct setting. A no-rethread harness means you can adjust the height externally, usually just by pushing a button.

The seat’s materials should be practical, too.

We poked and prodded every seat to see which might be the most comfortable for newborns. But the seat shouldn’t sacrifice practicality in the name of newborn comfort. Babies are, after all, known for the messes they create. Jennifer Beall Saxton, Founder and CEO of Tot Squad, told us parents should be cleaning their car seats at least every three months to get rid of all the dirt, sweat, drool and — well, you know, baby stuff. Some covers are easier to remove than others, and Saxton recommends parents select a black-colored seat, as they do a better job of hiding the mess.

Many of the car seats’ covers are machine washable for practicality’s sake, but parent testers weren’t psyched about the ones that aren’t (the Cybex Aton Q, Baby Trend Inertia, phil&teds Alpha, Britax B-Safe Elite, and Recaro Performance Coupe). And when it came to baby's comfort, all the testers felt confident that any of our finalists would be comfortable for their child.

Truth be told, we were pretty impressed with most of the seats we brought in when all testing was said and done. But two emerged as truly superior for their combination of flawless features and balance of form and function.