Forward facing car seat in rear facing car seat? What is safe?

[GummyDrops3]

Hi,
We are thinking of getting a Mercedes V class. There are 5 seats in the back, and three of them are rear facing. Can we put car seats on those rear facing seats? (Seats 1 & 2 in the image). They all have ISOFix connectors, so car seats can be fitted to them, but I've never seen any car seats in that orientation. They are always front facing.... Children are 2 & 3 years old.

Can anyone shed light on this? Our current Nuna car seats say the seats were not tested for that position and should not be used... what about other brands?

Thanks

This thread was a couple of years ago, so the same seats may not be available now, but it has a lot of useful information.
www.mumsnet.com/talk/car_seats_chat/4721709-8-9-seater-owners-rear-facing-seats-advice

You basically have to check two things.

1. Whether the car actually allows child seats to be used there/an adult to sit there while the vehicle is moving. Sometimes they are just able to reverse for comfort when the car is stationary.
2. Whether the child seat manual allows for it to be used on a rear-facing vehicle seat. The vast majority don't. I've never come across any rotating type ones which do. Britax do seem to allow it for their purely forward facing seats, like the Advansafix or their high back boosters. I believe Cybex might, as well? (Don't take my word for it, check the manuals, which you can download from their website). Last time I checked that was it, I think maybe Besafe don't explicitly mention it and might allow it for high back boosters. But their HBBs are so expensive they aren't popular in the UK anyway. Allison (who cover Nuna, Joie and Graco) don't allow it for any of their seats.

Quite often the child seat manual will explicitly prohibit it. It makes sense because they would have to run twice the crash tests and this is such a rare use case. To be honest, unless the child is already of high back booster age, there is little point in it. The longest lasting rear facing seats are the Swedish plus tested ones and they last much longer than the spinning seats anyway. It was quite a useful workaround years ago when you couldn't easily buy rear facing seats.