4 years + car seat with 5 point harness

[OnTheDrive]

Could anyone recommend a suitable car seat for my 4 year old, with 5 point harness please?

DS is 106cm and around 17.7kg. He is autistic with very limited understanding so a 5 point harness feels essential from a safety perspective - he’s quite the escape artist! He’s been in a joie 360 since around 12 months and this has worked well. We have recently turned him forward facing. We’d like to stick with isofix base.

Ideally looking for a seat that can last him until he’s 12 - I’ve tried having Google but am completely overwhelmed with the options and types!

The Cozy N Safe Hudson is great, with harness up to 25kg

Joie Bold?

Have you looked at in car safety centre? They offer specialist advice for children with additional needs and might have some solutions not on the wider market.

Windmill Special Needs Co are very helpful too.

I would speak to the In Car Safety Centre - they have special needs restraints which you can discuss with them which would be the best one for your needs.

Joie Bold is the standard car seat with the largest/longest lasting harness - unless you want to look at the rear facing ones up to 125cm/36kg. However the Bold is discontinued and replaced with a newer version - you have to find the old version with 25kg harness. 25kg will probably get you to around age 7, so you'll be stuck at that point hence speaking to ICSS (or any other special needs car seat retailer).

The only other option would be to import a foreign approved seat such as an American seat or Australian seat, because they have much longer lasting harnesses up to higher weight/height limits, with the benefit of this being that you can continue to use top tether, whereas many special needs restraints don't have this. But this is complicated legally - you may be able to get a medical exemption to allow you to use one, or you can rely on the goodwill of any police who ever do stop you to understand why you've made that choice. If you use a US car seat in the UK you will need to get a metal locking clip as well because American car seats are designed to work with ALR seatbelts which have a locking mode for child restraints, and most UK cars don't have this (if you pull it out all the way, it switches into this mode where it can only be made shorter and not longer). The locking clips which convert a standard UK ELR seatbelt into a locked seatbelt are not sold here, only in the US.

Unfortunately isofix maxes out at 33kg (combined child + seat weight) so whatever you get now will have to be at least partially secured using the car seatbelt. A lot of the longer harnessing seats do use isofix to keep them positioned but the car seatbelt does the majority of the attachment of the seat.

The special needs restraints are expensive and usually designed more for people who need postural support, but there are some less pricey options like the Crelling Harness which can be used with a high back booster. Anyway the ICSS can advise about what would be suitable.