Review: Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat

This is a rare product review interlude for me to extol the virtues of the Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat for the Australian market, perhaps useful to other tall people I know.

We have giant giant children and I’m a giant giant person married to a merely tall person. This makes rear-facing car seats really difficult, because they take up loads of room, and you’re not supposed to push your seat back into them (some instructions don’t even want the front seat touching a rear-facing seat). But at the same time, it is neither comfortable nor safe to travel with your knees smooshed into the dashboard, or (as I would have to, in front of some rear facing seats) with your feet resting up on the dashboard: an airbag deployment will break your legs.

Most of the solutions I’ve seen to this are either calculated using hypotheticals I don’t favour (wouldn’t you shatter your femur on request to prevent injury to your child? no? what kind of mother are you?), involve one parent being fairly short (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DH drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) or don’t work (you can centre-install the seat… which then inhibits both front seats from pushing back, because infant seats are wide. Uh).

Anyway, after complaining about this issue a lot when V was young, I did a touch more research this time around, and discovered that the feature we were looking for in seats was called “rear-facing install depth”, and therefore the search term is something like “Australia car seat rear facing shortest install depth” and the answer is the Safe-n-Sound Compaq at 52.5cm depth (one of the InfaSecure Kompressors was just slightly deeper, when I searched). This is about 7cm more precious leg room than the Babylove Prelude we had V in.  That is quite a lot of room! To be fair, I actually still can’t really sit in front of it (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DW drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) but Andrew can and perhaps I could in a suitably large car.

That’s really the main point of the review, I buy car seats on one axis. But it has a couple of other features I like: first, it comes in colours other than grey and black (although you can get it in grey or black if you like). We got the 2012 model in “apple green”; the current model, the Compaq AHR, comes in Cool Berry and in Blue. Second, as the baby gets taller, you can change the height of the shoulder straps by sliding the back up and down rather than re-threading the straps through higher holes. This was only ever slightly annoying in the Prelude, but I do think it’s an improvement. Finally, and importantly, it seems to allow the child themselves to be quite tall while still rear-facing. A is nearly 9 months now, and on about the 95th percentile for length, and it looks like she’ll be rear-facing until close to her birthday. This is longer than we were able to keep V rear-facing (although back then, rear-facing was by weight, not length).

Disclosures: this review was not solicted and I was not compensated for it in any way.

6 thoughts on “Review: Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat”

  1. Whereas my fairly miniature daughter is still rear facing at 2 years 2 months… that will finally need to change soon though.

    1. NZ has extended RF seats on the market (under European safety standards I think?) though, Australia doesn’t yet; last I heard, the new Australian safety standards themselves will approve extended rear-facing seats but have been held up somewhere in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for review.

      So in practice, in Australia, most states want children to RF to 6 months, and the largest RF seats on the market are only expected to RF even small to average sized children until about 12 months.

      So your smaller child probably has a bigger seat than my larger child!

      1. Yeah, we can use seats that have been certified by any of AU, US or EU. I was aware of the “toughest standards in the world” meaning that kids can’t RF for as long and so probably, uh, being less safe thing…

        And yes, P can RF until 18 kgs in her seat (Evenflo Symphony). She’ll probably get to 18 kgs by, err, age 5? She’ll be too tall fairly soon though.

        1. Heh, 18kg was the forward facing limit of V’s seat, and of all 5/6pt harnessed seats until recently. That was his weight at 3½ so he had to be moved to a booster with a seat-belt! This is actually younger than NSW law suggests, which wants children harnessed untl 4, but they do have a “outgrew the seat” clause. (I remember worrying when I read the UK wanted children in boosters until 12. I was 6′ at 12 years old! But it turns out they also have a “or reached N height” clause.)

          Infasecure now has a new AU standards Type G seat, which would be large enough to harness him now, but I don’t think we will return him to harnessing. He’s pretty well behaved in cars. I’d be tempted, if he was an escape artist though.

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