Is it safe for car seat to go in the front (no airbag)?

[UmMwahahahaaaaa]

(wasn't sure where to put this?)

The ideal solution for us in terms of access to kids etc is 3mth ds in the back with me and 2.5yo dd in the front (with dh driving!). Obv both in age-appropriate car-seats.

The car seats say no if there is an airbag, well, there isn't, so surely that implies it is ok?

Opinions please

I think legally it's ok, but that all the safety information states that the safest place is the rear, if you have a choice.

Check your manual. On ours, for example, if the seat is marked "U" (for Universal) it can be used both front and back - but it is vitally important that the airbag is deactivated if the car has one.

FWIW, have a look at www.rearfacing.co.uk for more information about safe travelling. In Scandinavia it is quite usual to have the child's car seat in the front passenger seat, but they use rearfacing seats which are 5 times safer in a frontal collision.

That website is fascinating reading, Smellen, thanks. I had dd in the rear-facing one until she really, really couldn't fit anymore.

Officially, yes, the seat is safe in the front but somehow it feels risky... wanted to get Mumsnetters opinions.

Do you have a rear-facing seat Smellen? We will have to get a new seat for ds anyway (he is in group 0 carry one at moment) - am very tempted to get a rear-facing one as we could put it in the front, then when they are both in back, they could see each other!

Cheers. Spent all evening perusing the rearfacing.co.uk forums! Very, very interesting. Was considering whether the Concord Ultimax would do the job - it is rearfacing to 13kg (dd is not heavier than that now, and would certainly do big ds for a while) but it seems it is not rated well. Going to research thoroughly. So thanks for this, glad I raised this before we bought ds's next stage seat .

According to the smartson website (Swedish Which?), the best seats are the BeSafe and the Maxi Cosi Mobi (which you can import, although there is someone on the rearfacing site who has an unused one for sale, or at least had one last time I looked). Their ratings included stuff such as ease of fitting, so not purely on crash test data.

Looking at the results of performance in crash tests (a table in Swedish, again on the rearfacing site), the BeSafe outperformed the Brio Zento. Also, the rearfacing site administrator, and many of the staff at toddler.se had bought that seat for their LOs, which is why we bought it. When we bought our second RF seat, my DH went to MK to check it out before purchasing, and it fitted the car well and looked solid and well made. The FF equivalent of the Multi Tech is the 1-2-3 Evolva, which did not get a very high rating in the Which? tests published in June 2006, but that was partly because it had underperformed in frontal collision tests, and of course, by turning it into a RF seat, that area would have been much improved.