Britax Baby Safe Plus - help me understand Isofix

[covycrump]

I'm expecting in just under a month from now, and finding the car seat business very confusing (neither my partner nor I drive, so we don't own a car, and anything car-related is alien to me). We do need to get car seat so we can use it in friends' cars or taxis, so an important criteria is that it is easy to move between cars, and is pretty portable.

The Britax Baby Safe Plus looks promising, and is well reviewed on Mumsnet, but I really don't get this Isofix thing. Is it something that you acquire separately, and is it essential or will the seat function without it? Can the car seat just seatbelt into the back seat of any car that we need to travel in, or does this Isofix thing have to be fixed into the car too?

Please help me understand this, as I don't want to rely too much on the sayso of the sales assistant when I go to buy one.

Isofix is a way of anchoring the car seat into the car, attached more or less to the car itself and not reliant on seat belts.
For the car seat you have chosen you would have to use an Isofix base to make it an Isofix carseat. NOT ALL CARS HAVE ISOFIX. Cars older than 02 are unlikely to have it at all.
It is not essential, the seat will function without it, you just need to make sure that the carseat you have chosen fits well in the cars you will be using most often.
The plastic seat belt buckle must not touch the plastic on the car seat at all. If it does, it's called buckle crunch and is not safe.
The car seatbelt must also fit around it in the correct way.
They can be fitted in using the car seat belts, just practise before the baby arrives as the last thing you want to be doing with a newborn waiting in the rain is trying to work out how the bloody thing fits in. Once you become adept, it will be no different to using a base.
In your circumstances, I would probably say you don't need a base

Okay, I think I get this now. So I could buy that car seat, not buy the base, and seatbelt it in place when we get taxis. I think that's going to be the best thing to do. Unfortunately, we won't have a car to practise on, but fingers crossed we'll be able to work it out without distressing the baby too much when the time comes to take it home from hospital...

Thanks for the advice.

you're welcome. Do you have friends with cars that you could "borrow" for a couple of hours?

Oh sorry, I didn't see you'd come back. Not really - living in an inner London borough, hardly anyone I know has a car (nor a baby for that matter...). However, I imagine that as I start to get to know other local mothers though groups and things, circumstances for lifts to places may arise - I'm hoping that other people will have a better instinct for securing car seats in their own cars than I do! The issue of what to buy is no longer relevant, as a neighbour very kindly gave us a car seat that her baby has outgrown on Sunday afternoon. The instructions look logical enough; we're just using visualisation of cars at the moment to make sure we are as confident as we can be when it comes to bringing the Crumpet home!