The 6-position headrest, retractable cupholder and hideaway storage unit. The TurboBooster LX requires a bit more setup out of the box than the Chicco KidFit ClearTex Plus. (All in graco high back booster all, it comes out to just a few minutes extra.) The armrests, cup holder, and seat pads need to be attached, and it takes a moment to connect the top and bottom half of the seat.
We just got a Chico booster a few months back for a little more…but I guess I’ll be getting another since that one DOES have latches and my girl is very comfortable in it. I just can’t believe there are booster seats with no latches…I was shocked graco extend to fit to find out this was a thing. A November 2003 study by the NHTSA found that seat belt pretensioners and force limiters were able to successfully reduce the amount of distance that test dummies moved in a crash, including in the back seat.
For example, when crash testing high-back boosters, extremely large or heavily padded side wings would likely help a seat pass side-impact crash tests with flying colors. But put a kid in that seat in the wild, and those same side wings could tempt them to lean forward in their seat, which is an unsafe posture. “In the real world, we’ve found that kids don’t like having those big blinders on that block their sight lines, so they tend to move their head graco high back booster forward to see around them,” Jermakian said. Much to our surprise, the more we learned about independent crash testing, the less certain we became that it made sense for us to commission our own lab tests. For the first version of this guide, published in 2018, we elected to do independent crash testing on the booster seats that we considered as our top contenders. We hired Calspan, a highly regarded lab in Buffalo, New York, to perform the tests.
The only thing I’d like is if it had bolts to secure it to the frame. No matter what type of restraint a kid is in, experts recommend that they sit in the back seat of the car until they are at least 13 years old. In a sea of competition, the Chicco GoFit Plus stood out as the best backless-only booster with LATCH that we tested. Get the best value on product protection including fast repairs or replacements.
Ashley Ziegler is a lifestyle writer specializing in motherhood, family health, and consumer products. Manufacturers with top-rated boosters can use this logo in their advertising. You can find this information in the manual, and also stamped on the bottom of the seat. The date of manufacture label is on the bottom of the backless portion of the seat, too, and will show when the seat was manufactured. The label prohibiting use on aircraft is on the bottom of the backless portion of the seat.