Recaro

Isofix seats SHOULD fit an Isofix equipped car, why doesn't mine?

We received this question from a mother concerned that when purchasing a child seat it was not a good fit into her car. We thought that the subsequent correspondence may be useful information for others who have the same or similar concerns relating to whether an Isofix seat is compatible with their Isofix equipped car.


Hello.
I have a skoda fabia estate 2005. Today I went to a children's retailer to purchase a recaro isofix base for the young profi plus car seat that I have. The worker informed me, having tried to fit the base, that it is not suitable for my car due to the positioning of the isofix bars in the car, i.e. quite low and deep. Please can you clarify? Is this product unsuitable for my car? Thank you.


Hi,
we cannot confirm that that seat should fit that car. We can confirm it should fit the hatchback but it has not been tested in the estate.

Kind regards,

Stuart


Dear Stuart

Thank you for your email. Further to this, a John Lewis staff member fitted the recaro isofix into my car (with some difficulty), phoned recaro and was told that as long as there are isofix points then it should be suitable. Can you say anything further about this?

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,

T.


Hi,
the theory is that any Isofix seat should fit any Isofix brackets and in most cases this works perfectly.

If a car manufacturer chooses to make cushions that are very deep or an odd shape which obscure the brackets then that of course is their manufacturing decision. There isn't much Recaro or any other child seat manufacturer can do about it, it may be that the car manufacturer has not found a way to accomodate the Isofix brackets properly in the design of a car chassis, especially if it is an older design of chassis.
You would think that the car manufacturer would take more care when designing the seats so as not to obscure the path to the brackets, or include pull out sections which allow an unrestricted access to the brackets but all this would cost more production time and cost, which would inevitably be passed onto the customer in the showroom.

Isofix brackets in cars are mandatory since Jan 2006 so they have to install them in the car, but maybe they really are only sticking to the letter of the law in that they have been installed but not really trying to accomodate the easy use of them for the customer.

Of course it may also be that the Skoda/VAG group have their own set of child seats which are specially designed so that they will fit the car which of course forces you to purchase their seats instead of anybody elses, maybe check on that as well.

Kind regards,

Stuart


Dear Stuart

Thank you for your excellent and detailed answer. It had crossed my mind that the principle of a universal fitting such as isofix might 'go against' some of the basic tenets of business and therefore some organisations might try to 'avoid' it. However, one would have hoped that we would try to make child safety as easy as possible and that 'competition' could be based on the features of different seats.

Anyway, thank you so much for your emails. I really appreciate you taking the time. I will speak to Skoda.

Kind regards,
T.