Travel car seat - under 18 months

[Caspianberg]

We haver a fixed 0-4 years seat we use on a daily basis. The maxi cosi mica.

We will need to travel in the next few months to sick family member (hopefully, covid permitting), so I have been looking at portable car seat options.

Baby is currently 3 months old, car seat likely to be used from 4months- until he doesnt fit. But to be a rear facing that is portable (needs no isofix as will need to be used in family cars, taxis and hire car), is our only option a baby capsule type thing?

Having looked at maxi cosi baby capsules, I don't think he will fit in them very long. Ie I looked at the maxi cosi tinca, but that says lasts babies 45-75cm. He was 65cm already when we last measured 2 weeks ago, and is already in 62-68cm clothing (3-6 months), and some 6-9months (68-74cm). So if the seat is only good until he is 75cm, its not going to fit after maybe 6months old max.

What would we use from 6-18months? as he can't face forward at that age.

Any recommendations? A ideally not too pricy seat (will be used maybe 6 weeks max between now and 18 ish months old), easy enough to carry as I may be travelling alone with baby, luggage, etc. Needs to fit easy enough into different size cars ie hire cars I wont necessarily know the brand until the day.
Happy to spend a bit more if it will last longer.

Joie tilt? It's fairly small and lightweight for a car seat and belt fitted so it can be installed in most cars. It's a birth to 18kg seat but it has quite a small shell so it doesn't last most children to 18kg as they get too tall; however it would certainly last until 2 and beyond.

I have seen cybex baby seats seem to go bigger. Says until 87cm and 18 months rather than 75cm and 12months that maxi cosi suggest. Any experience?
The cybex aton M i size.

The tilt seems a good possibility though. Although I would need it delivered outside the uk, and not sure thats available? Will look into it. Is it light enough to hang off pram handle if needed to move between a and b?

Most infant seats fit until baby is growing out of 12-18 month clothes as a guide. It would be very unusual to be out of one before the age of one. The joie juva is £40 and is one of the longer lasting baby seats

The joie tilt/stages are the best option for travel rear facing seats beyond that in my opinion.

Joie Steadi also worth a look. Similar to tilt but easier to adjust the headrest and a slightly taller shell. It’s actually currently on sale in Argos for £70

Maxi Cosi Tinca will be no good because of the height limit. Maxi Cosi Citi will likely do, though. It's widely available in Europe and generally one of the cheapest car seats around. There's no height limit on it but it's fairly generous and tends to fit babies until about 18m - 2y. It fits onto many of the popular pram brands using adapters. You can't really hang car seats off handles, they are far too heavy with the baby in.

Fits pretty much every car using seatbelt.

Joie Tilt isn't widely available outside the UK.

We had dc2 in a maxi cosi cabriofix until 18 months, much taller dc1 used same model for 12 months.

Maxi Cosi Citi and Cabriofix are the same seat BTW except that the Cabriofix is compatible with isofix bases as well as being able to seatbelt fit. Citi is only seatbelt fit, otherwise they are identical :)

Apologies, I know this is an old thread but I can across it searching for info on the Citi car seat, saw your knowledgeable posts about the Citi and Cabriofix @BertieBotts and wondered if you might be kind enough to help. We've been offered a second hand 2019 Citi by friends (no car accidents and no other owners). The seat seems to be discontinued and they have lost the newborn insert. Do you happen to know whether the Cabriofix insert here will be compatible with the Citi? I'm having difficulty getting an answer from Maxi Cosi though I have tried. Also, there is actually no reference to a newborn insert or newborn fit in the instruction manual for the Citi but I thought newborn inserts were always recommended? Any advice on the safety aspect would be hugely appreciated.

Hi @pfennigs tricky one - I wouldn't like to say with 100% certainty, but older product images of the Citi do show a newborn insert which looks similar to that one. It looks like they used that insert style until about 2017 at which point they switched to the newer design (which is rounder and a bit flatter). That is also how the inserts were in the Cabriofix - I am not sure exactly when the switch was, but late 00s certainly the style of insert as you linked, and then before the R44 Cabriofix was retired, it had the round, flatter type insert as pictured in the manual below.

This version of the manual shows the newer insert - on page 30 for washing instructions and also on page 14 (showing that it should be used when the straps are in the lower position and removed when the straps are in the higher position) - this is not hugely clear. I am not sure if this is the same manual you have? It is sometimes the case that over a car seat's life the company will re-release the manual and redesign covers and inserts.

www.manua.ls/maxi-cosi/citi/manual?p=30

I did find this for you which seems to be an actual Citi cover. General consensus seems to be that second hand covers and inserts are fine as long as they are original. Hopefully postage wouldn't be too much from Germany (or looking at your username, maybe you have a German connection!) It was a much more widely sold seat model on the continent, they only marketed it periodically in the UK.

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/395511218018

@BertieBotts thank you so much for your help! Our manual is actually the same as that one, though with different page numbers - but I've found the images you mentioned (though I still can't actually understand the page 14 one!). It's bizarre that they don't label the newborn insert on any of the diagrams. It's not a great manual really - it doesn't mention maximum recommended height either, just weight, which is annoying as I'm hoping to go straight from the Citi to an Axkid Minikid 2 but don't know if that's realistic.

Unfortunately that particular seat cover on ebay doesn't ship to the UK, though I could try to find another. If I can't find one then on balance do you think it would be safest to get the Cabriofix one, or just put baby in without, since the manual doesn't mention it? (Or we can just get a new seat, but seems like a shame).

I am honestly not sure if the older Cabriofix and older Citi inserts are identical, even though they look similar - sorry. I don't know if it would be a problem to use the wrong one. If it is exactly the same shell, which I think it is, then it theoretically would be fine, but I'm just not confident enough to say yes go for it - sometimes there are really similar seats but some small difference will cause one of the inserts to sit differently or something.

I have been through older versions of the German Maxi Cosi site on wayback machine but nothing useful, sorry. The only vaguely useful thing I found is this listing on a site for replacement parts for pushchairs, where they say that it fits the Citi "with minor restrictions" (which I think means it isn't a perfect fit but they consider it OK).

They seem to be fairly strict about whether items fit different seats - but even so it's a bit of a shaky resource. They say this insert will fit "almost all" baby car seats which is a bit suspect, though it might simply be that because this is an older style of newborn insert, they were a bit more basic at that time. I did find on one of their other listings, they say that the polystyrene insert for the Citi and Cabriofix are different - the Citi is identical to the (very much older seat) Cabrio, which is the version of Cabriofix Maxi Cosi had out before isofix was popular. https://www.kinderwagen-ersatzteil-profi.com/1-x-maxi-cosi-cabriofix-sitzverkleinerer-sitzeinlage-kopfschutz-polster-neugeboreneneinsatz-fuer-autositz-babyschale-farbe-schwarz-nomad-black

I wouldn't use it without any insert as I think you'll probably struggle to get a good fit for a newborn without one, which could be dangerous as car seats are known to be stressful for newborn cardio-respiratory systems.You have to go back about 15-20 years to get to a point where newborn inserts in car seats weren't standard. I would not want to be using a seat which is that outdated (even though I did use a very similar seat at the time, for my teenager, and I am fairly sure it had no newborn insert at all!)

If you want to keep looking for another Citi insert, you could look at all the ebay listings (tick the "used" box to avoid being flooded by Chinese dropship products) and if you find one which won't ship or even someone selling the entire seat, send them a message to see if they'd be willing to only post the insert itself.

I will do some annotation of the manual - I hate Maxi Cosi manuals - they are infuriatingly obtuse and flipping back and forth between the diagrams and text is a huge pain online.

It doesn't give a size restriction, because this seat conforms to the R44 regulation not the R129 one. The R44 regulation didn't have any height limits. It is a pretty decently sized seat - a friend of mine had both her 99th centile children go from the Citi directly into the Minikid 2.

My numbers added in green to more easily differentiate them.

Picture 1 shows the car seat with the newborn insert head support and seat flattener thing in place, and the straps in the lower position.

Picture 2 shows the seat without the insert, with the straps in the higher position. You probably need to be really good at spot the difference to notice this.

These two pictures are meant to communicate that you can adjust the seat as your baby grows.

Picture 3 is a close-up photo of the back of the seat, showing two different slots for the harness straps.

Picture 4 is supposed to be (!) a blown-up diagram of the two harness slots. Because clearly they can see the tiny confusing picture 4 is unclear and they thought this might help (??!!)

Picture 5 is supposed to show you that you use the lower belt slots for a smaller/shorter/younger baby, and the higher belt slots for a taller (longer)/older baby. It's supposed to be a baby sitting under a height marker, I think, and the plus/minus is supposed to communicate bigger/smaller. (If you think this is confusing you should see the newborn insert for the Maxi Cosi Mica, which has a pictogram suggesting you should remove the insert when your child grows hair!) 🤷‍♀️

I can't actually see what the person is doing in diagram 3 but usually with this kind of seat there's a metal clip (yoke) holding the two shoulder straps onto the long tightening strap at the bottom. Usually you unhook one shoulder strap at a time from the yoke, pull them through the hole and slot it through the correct one for your baby's size, then reattach it to the yoke making sure it doesn't get twisted as you do this.

It is quite likely that you'd keep the straps in the lower position, then remove the insert when the baby is about 3 months old, which will give them more space in the seat and then you move the straps up when they get tall enough that their shoulders are higher than the higher up set of straps, which will probably happen somewhere around 6-9 months.

Wow @BertieBotts thank you so much for taking the time to give all this help, and especially the diagram annotations! It's incredibly kind of you. I think I will a) keep looking for a second hand Citi insert as you suggested, b)keep trying with Maxi Cosi in case they can confirm for definite either way with the insert they have for sale and c) just buy a new seat if neither of the above works out, since it doesn't sound like a good idea to have baby in without one - the manual was really not clear on that, since as you say the pictures are so hard to read (but makes much more sense now). Thank you again.💐