Hellobee Boards

We have a Graco 4ever that he's about to outgrow the seated height in, a Graco Nautilus, and a Britax Pioneer.

The 4ever and Nautilus are both combo seats though (Nautilus is harnessed, high back, and backless) so they might not count. I like all of them, even though I don't like the material on the Britax for some reason, even though it doesn't bother my son.

Ugh, we have the Graco Atlas 65. Thanks for posting this. Three things I'm seeing:
- Most of the seats, if not all, were fine with the average 3-year old dummy.
- The issue seems to be with the dummies that were near the seats' upper limits, AND, it seems that they were using a harness when most parents would have switched to the seatbelt setting at that point.
- They did not compare damage levels to high back boosters. I mean, opk, there's so damage to these seats, but would there have been worse damage in a high back booster?

We have a Chicco myfit that my daughter loves. It's comfy and was super easy to install with both the seatbelt and the latch. (we did buy the upgraded one because I got it on sale so it has the super cinch which made the latch super easy to use)

@pinkb: right- I feel like it’s far more dangerous to use the seatbelt on a kid who isn’t ready, than use the harness appropriately. In a world of things to worry about, I just can’t freak out too much over this. But again I WOULD worry if my kid was maxing out the weight of the seat.

We have the Britax seat. I started letting DD1, who is 5.75 and 48 lbs, use a high back booster we got as a floater. She’s doing great in it and actually fell asleep the other day and didn’t slump forward like I was nervous about. I would have been fine her her in the Britax as a HBB, but it turns out it’s harder to buckle. DD1 is a peanut, so we moved her into the Britax (she was in a Diono Radian R100 which was fine but the Britax has cup holders so cleeeearly wins in her opinion). By the time she’s anywhere near that upper weight limit DD1 will be out of the HBB. So like others said, I’d focus on other seats.

Short version: I do comparable testing for a living and don't like CR's test method at all.

Long Version;
Let me preface this by saying that I manage a lab dedicated to testing a specific kind of safety equipment (not car seats, but we do destructive testing of other plastic equipment so it is similar).

The standards are standards for a reason, and all these seats met the standards. They protect people most of the time. No seat can guarantee safety. They also probably used a very low sample size. Maybe even one per test. That is not enough to give you information. If they did maybe five or more per test and all had the same results, then I would be more likely to be concerned about these seats. Does the standard say to do crash tests, or is it force/energy based? Probably the latter, because there are fewer testing variables that way. Also, any manufacturer is going to do a ton of testing to make sure their product has enough of wiggle room above the minimum standard because there are natural deviations within the test results.