although I appreciate that Adventuredad sells rear facing seats, I understand that he is just trying to give the best information to all parents about safety - please don't run him down for trying to impart info that is in all our interests - he sells seats in Sweden and there are a host of suppliers all around England now, so I think we should listen to his input, and take on board bits that might be useful. I particularly want to strongly support what he is saying about rearfacing seats.
Side impact protection for example in all forward facing seats is pretty much irrelevant and useless in most impacts- the vast majority of crashes are combined with a brief moment of very hard braking (pre-braking) as you do your best to avoid the crash (this is an automatic reaction, and is sometimes almost involuntary and so is rarely avoided). Unfortunately this flings your LO's head forward so at the point of impact their head is no-where near any side impact protection. With rear facing seats the opposite is true.
This is just a minor point that is often over looked and is secondary to the main issue of rear facing seats giving significantly better protection to LO's spine's and necks, ppreventing the internal decapitation that is often seen with FF seats.
Having said that, as someone pointed out, it is all a very personal choice and many parents still opt to go FF. I just wanted to mention this in case other parents are reading this thread who are considering their next seat :)
PS- I don't have anything to do with Adventuredad or rearfacing seat sales, I'm just a parent to gets sooo frustrated at our government not providing parents with the best info about car seat safety.....