ISOFIX seats now for sale in Australia

I hadn’t noticed, writing my car seat review (most of which I drafted about a month ago), that as of just a few days ago, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have signed off on the 2013 updates to the Australian Safety Standards allowing ISOFIX (with top tether) baby car seats to be sold and used in Australia. Car Advice has an article about it. Maxi-Cosi has seats for sale already. Britax (the Safe-n-Sound company) will apparently follow this month.

The new standards should also allow more extended rear-facing, which is good news for children’s safety in cars. That said, I am not sure if we personally will get A an extended rear-facing or ISOFIX seat for practical reasons: we car-share, and I don’t know the ISOFIX status of all the models of car we drive, and then of course there’s also the seat depth issue: if they have a longer seat depth (the two Maxi-Cosi seats so far are both 57cm), A is safer at the expense of me getting airbag injuries (and/or losing steering wheel play because my knees are touching it). Tricky!

But average sized people and/or people who own their own cars may be interested to hear that you can now get one brand of ISOFIX seat in Australia with more to come!

2 thoughts on “ISOFIX seats now for sale in Australia”

  1. Is that like ‘latch’: you attach the seat to some little anchors at the seat base rather than using the seatbelt?

    We use LATCH for both our kids, B is still rear facing at 3.5 yo! I don’t expect we’ll need to turn him around anytime soon. The Diono Radian seat he is in has such a huge height limit for rear facing there is just no reason. His legs are kinda getting long, but he seems not to mind sitting with them folded up.

    1. Yeah, ISOFIX is the EU’s word for LATCH (or a very similar system, I’m not sure they’re totally the same). In Australia the seats will also need to still be attached with a top tether strap, and they need to pass the Australia Standards testing, so imported seats will not be legal. (Chances of actually being caught using a non-AS seat seem low to me, but not legal.) I think it will take a while for really extended rear-facing seats to come onto the market. The Maxi-Cosi seats say “up to 12 months” in their marketing material.

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