Great car seat for the money.
July 24, 2014
First of all this car seat looks very nice and comes with some cool features. I will break down my review into different categories and give my opinion for each. This is my second child so I have dealt with car seats for several years and I am a Firefighter so I help customers often with their own seats.
Description of seat
The fabric is very soft and my daughter is very comfortable in the seat. I also like that you are able to store the latch straps and the top tether strap. This conveniently keeps these straps out of the way when you are moving the seat. Another feature I really like are the harness pockets that allow me to store the harness out of the way so it doesn?t get stuck underneath my daughter when I am putting her in the seat. Also preventing her from getting burned from the buckles (I live in AZ).
Fit
First of all, I have a 2013 Hyundai Elantra hatchback so it is a very small car. I was surprised at how much room was still left on both sides of this car seat for passengers to sit. I installed the car seat rear facing and I still had at least 2 inches before it hit the front seats and that was with the front seats in the farthest position towards the rear seat. This seat actually takes up less room then my infant seat did.
Installation
Out of the box the car seat comes set up for forward facing so if you are going to use it as a rear facing seat, like I am, then you need to move the latch strap to the rear facing belt path which requires you to remove only the front portion of the trim cover. I found this to be very easy to do. It took me only a few minutes.
The car seat fit very easily into the middle rear seat of my Elantra. I felt that attaching the latch strap to my vehicles lower anchors was very easy. I really like the latch guides that make it effortless to find the lower anchors. They give you plenty of latch strap to reach your vehicles lower anchors which is nice because my previous infant seat had short latch straps, making it harder to install. Another cool feature of this car seat is a flip bar underneath the car seat that aligns it to the right angle when installing rear facing.
There is no level or level line like most car seats have so I am assuming the lower bar that folds down is lining it up to the perfect angle. When I went to tighten the seat, I had a little trouble getting the seat tight at first but I think mostly because of the lack of room in my car made it harder to maneuver. I had the car seat installed in about 5 minutes. I do like to get my seat extremely tight so it does take me a little longer. I always find that it is a little bit harder to install all car seats rear facing then forward facing.
Easy of Use
It is very easy to get my daughter in and out of the seat. She fits very comfortable. Out of the box this is setup for a taller kids so I did have to adjust the height of the harness, which required me to re-thread the belt into the lower holes. I found this very easy to do. I do have to say I was not that impressed with tightening the harness. It seemed to tighten on one side more than the other making it a little more difficult to get the proper fit for my daughter. I finally found that if I held tension on both sides of the harness as I tightened that it would tighten evenly.
Safety
I read this on their website which I like to know as part of purchasing my car seat.
At Evenflo, we continue to go above and beyond government standards to provide car seats that are 2X the Federal Crash Test Standard. In addition to this, these seats have e3 Side Impact? Protection, which contains 3 layers of engineered foam designed and tested to reduce side impact forces up to 50%.
Overall
I think for the money this is a very nice seat. It is designed with some nice safety features, installation was pretty easy, it has nice materials and it is light weight. I think there are nicer car seats out there but if you are on a budget and can?t spend $300 this car seat should work just great. I really like the latch guides especially if you are going to have to move the seat a lot. Overall I don?t think you can find better for the money especially buying from a reputable company like evenflo.
This product review was collected by the manufacturer.