Three car seats in a Ford Focus estate - anyone done it?

[Florenceatemycake]

Hi all

We're expecting number 3 in a few months and would like to keep our current car if possible.

Our children are 4 (in a high back booster) and 2.

Has anyone managed this and if so, any tips?!

Thanks x

Don’t think it will be possible unless one child
is in the front seat. I had to upgrade to a Galaxy when I was in expecting no 3 because it has three full seats in the back. Plus front seats are like armchairs 😍

Try somewhere like the In Car Safety Centre - they’ll be able to tell you what three seats, if any, will fit.

I’ve always found that if you have want to get three in a row then, other than splurging on a Multimac, the key is having different brands so so that jigsaw together safely. Same brands tend to mean all the bits that stick out stick out at the same height so they don’t fit.

So helpful. Thank you. Have you any experience of a Multimac? I'd never even heard of them!

Please don't buy a multimac - they are one of the most unsafe things you could put your children in. Just google it and read the horror stories and hope that's enough to put you off.

There are only a handful of cars that can fit 3 seats in the back - if you are on Facebook join a group like car seat advice UK and then search in the group and there are loads of posts recommending cars that fit 3 seats.

It might be possible depending on the model/year of focus. We did it with a mondeo which has the same size internal frame as the focus. Not isofix though, had to be secured with searbelts

It's a 2017 Active. Thanks, that's helpful. Not bothered about isofix particularly.

It's ridiculous to say that the Multimac is the most unsafe thing ever. It's about equivalent to any other forward facing car seat. It is no use if you want to do extended rear facing though.

Agree that it's more about the shape of the seats if you are planning to try and fit three across. The two sides are not identical - you'll get miniscule differences due to the seatbelt buckle in the middle seat. Seatbelt fitted is a good idea because you get a little more flexibility. If the 2yo is not rear facing, you might want to try them in a Swedish type RF seat as these tend to have flexibility both left to right and front to back, which can allow some space. Some of the cheaper infant car seats have belt fitted bases. HBB seats vary in their width at different points, and i-size ones are all fairly slim.

I wasn’t a fan of the multi Mac as I found it very cumbersome, but that was in part due to DD4 being very difficult to get in and out a seat.

I know two people who love theirs though.

As pp said, some belt fitted ERF seats have some wiggle room in where on the seat they are placed. You could have a seat like the BeSafe Stretch B (suitable from birth to 36kg/125cm (I think)) on one side. the HBB in the middle, then a narrow ERF seat on the other side. The minikids and I think its the britax ERF seat are the two narrowest. fwiw, my childminder has two axkid minikids and a ff seat in her freelander. minikids either side and ff in the middle. Agree with others to avoid the multimac.

I've just replaced my focus with a Mondeo estate and it's much wider. You could have barely sat a 5 year old between the two car seats in the focus, but my rather large arse fits comfortably in the Mondeo, probably depends on the model though.

Not true at all. Forward facing car seats have some side protection, a multimac places 2 children very close to the doors meaning they lose the survival space that's created between the door and where a car seat should go.

I have three joie steadi's in the back of a fiesta.

Closeness to the door is going to vary depending on the car anyway. We have DS3 in a Joie spin seat that has the little pop out bits on the sides. In our normal 5 seater cars, it is usually some distance from the door, but we recently rented a 7 seater Berlingo and on that you could only just physically open the pop out, as it would be almost touching the door. In some car seats/cars those things can't be used as the seat is too close to the door. Yes it's true you're going to be closer to the door than a standard car seat, but that is not necessarily a big problem.

The side impact protection in the Multimac is not good compared with modern, especially r129 car seats because it's an older design now, but you can get some additional side impact protection by using the YVLA headrest. An old Which review criticised the lack of side impact protection once the YVLA was outgrown, which used to be at approximately age 6, so it is now allowed and recommended to use the YVLA right up to the end of using the seat (so up to approx age 12). I understand that you do have to buy these separately, which is not really ideal. What you have to put into context here is that at the time that it was reviewed by Which, which was in 2010, the most common way to secure children aged 6-10 in the car was with a backless booster; this also provides no side impact protection.

I'm not going to argue that it's the best thing ever because it's not really; it won't suit most people, there are practical issues with its usage and in terms of safety in particular, it's over 20 years old as a design, but to be fair to them, they did use the most up to date cutting edge features at that time that were seen in barely any other car seats. Some of the basic cheaper seats today still have not caught up even to that. It's true that nowadays, the latest safety features far outstrip the Multimac. Extended rear facing for example is especially lacking, and the side impact protection could be better, but it's basically equivalent to a high end basic/older model or a "premium" version of some of the generic brands. It is the only non-special-needs car seat that can harness forward facing over 25kg.

"Most unsafe thing" is being totally unrestrained, or having a car seat fitted incorrectly. Most unsafe legal thing is probably some cheap basic car seat that a child is only just at the minimum weight limit for. Multimac is nowhere near either of those options. It can provide a solution in the case that for example the only other option is to have the third child with no car seat at all in the middle seat (which is legal, if you can't physically fit one in). Plus, it was originally designed to solve the problem that the boot seats in 7-seaters used to be pretty lethal in a rear shunt; I've no idea if that is still a problem in modern cars that needs solving, but it certainly does solve for that problem.

"Most unsafe thing" is being totally unrestrained, or having a car seat fitted incorrectly.

I think this is actually the most important point.

The In Car Safety centre say that around 70% of car seats are incorrectly, or not ideally, fitted. Including 6% of isofix seats.

A properly fitted Multimac, using it as an example, is a better option than a poorly fitted “better” brand.

We have done it temporarily when babysitting, 2 high back boosters and a proper one for a much younger child. It was fine for the day but no I wouldn't have done it permanently, it didn't look comfortable nor especially safe. I felt like the high back boosters were a little squashed and not positioned as ideally as I'd have liked.

(But may be better with different seats of course)