Hi I have a baby boy due in January and want to get a recaro car seat and I guess booster seat when he's older? I'm not even sure what I need. It's my first child. Anyone have a preference for this car?

 

Congrats! I have a 14 month old and he loves his Recaro ProSport. My goal is it will be his last child seat, since he can use the harness until 90lbs and seat belt until 120lbs. It is incredibly easy to install :-).

But here is the downside, it is only a front facing carseat (and 20lbs minimum). So you may want to get yourself an infant child seat which is rear facing. We used the Graco Snugride 32, I installed the base between the two rear seats of the MINI and attached it to the latches on either side. It worked great there because both front seats could slide back into comfortable positions. The SnugRide 32 was nice because it was able to support my kid until 32lbs and 32inches. My only complaint about it is that it wouldn't attach to shopping carts and we weren't comfortable with the carseat sitting on top of the shopping cart without being clamped down. So we were always taking the stroller too or placing him in a second shopping cart. After purchasing the SnugRide 32, we hear the smaller SnugRide could attach to shopping carts, but it only supported a maximum of 22lbs.

I just did a quick search and it turns out Recaro now makes an infant seat Recaro Young Profi Plus. I wasn't able to find a US seller.

 

Great help.
You wanna sell these things when you are done?

 

Thanks so much mark. I think i'll do the exact same setup and look into that smaller graco one.

 

If you get a chance you should look at Swedish cart seats.
They have a higher standard for crash tests then USA.
Here is place that ships to the states.
http://www.carseat.se/store.html

 

It'll be a while, I'm planning on more kids.

 

Normally latch is only for the seating locations. The manual for one of our seats says the middle may be used if the vehicle manufactures allows it. Mini's manual says nothing on this. You can decide for yourself what that means, but when it comes to safety, I don't take chances. Same thing for our Chicco infant car seat, so it was installed with the middle seat belt in our WRX and in the right-rear in our Mini. Subaru says latch only for side seating positions. We went with this infant seat over the Graco because it allowed the passenger seat to move back further.

We're now using a Britax Marathon(rear facing in the Mini, which is a pain getting my son in an out of.

I would have considered Recaro but with no local stores to try them out that was out of the question. Making sure a store model fits in the car and can be installed properly was more important than a brand name.

http://www.car-safety.org/ is a wealth of information