Cosmo 2.0 Smart

Most car seats (no all though so double check) have adaptors for most prams. Universal/maxi Cosi adaptors fit on lots of seats including the avionaut Cosmo, which is good and less pricey than the pixel pro. I personally got all the stuff to fix my carseat to the pram and then did it once. So if/when we have baby number 2 I might just get an erf fixed seat from birth. It didn't take long for the carseat and baby combined to weigh too much for me to carry anyway, even with a lower centile baby!

Bear in mind you tend to get echo chambers recommending the same things again and again but a lot of the time the people making the recommendations are either repeating what they see others recommending, they are talking about the one seat they have used with no way to compare it to other options or they are financially motivated (e.g. influencers, retailers). I used to work with car seats and also have gone down many, many ADHD rabbitholes with them over the last ~16 years, so have more knowledge on this topic than most though appreciate I don't know everything. But am happy to answer what I can. **Seats you mentioned** IMO, Pixel Pro is a lovely seat but the Avionaut Cosmo has many of the same features for much less money. The brilliant thing about the Avionaut seats is the positioning of the baby which is achieved with their inserts, which work differently to most baby seats. The Pixel has a more complicated insert which means you can essentially custom fit it to any age/shape of baby and it will always have a perfect fit, whereas the Cosmo insert is simpler, which makes it easier to use. Do you need a 100% perfect fit? Not really. Good enough is OK. Cosmo will give you a very good fit at pretty much any age, which is a lot better than most infant car seats do. I don't rate the Maxi Cosi 360 seat at all. It's fine, but it's nothing special and there is no way that it justifies the price tag. It's a shame, because Maxi Cosi used to be the absolute stand out gold star in infant car seats but their offerings over the last few years have been gimmicky and don't last long enough. Joie i-Level used to stand out from the competition in terms of offering the "lie flat" type seat at a much lower price point than its competitors, but these days it's not the only one on the market and there are options at various prices. It depends what you want really. **General things to note** The vast majority of car seat brands and travel system type prams on the market today use what used to be called Maxi Cosi type adapters or multi-brand/universal adapters. Notable exceptions are Silver Cross, Graco, Ickle Bubba and Hauck. For some prams you can buy two types of adapter, e.g. Silver Cross do an adapter for their own car seats and then a different one for other brand car seats. The Maxi Cosi/universal type has a distinctive shape, the bottom of the adapter is unique to the pram but the top of it will have a sort of 3D "U" shape with the middle of the U filled in. You can learn to spot this. When you see prams with a list of compatible car seats, what that means is that the company have in their factory or marketing office a selection of currently-popular car seats, plus any of their own branded car seats of course. They will test the set up with those models and list them as being compatible. There is no way that any pram company is going to test every single car seat on the market, but the compatability list is much longer in reality. At a bare minimum, if you see an older version of a car seat listed (e.g. Cybex Cloud Z) then a newer version (e.g. Cybex Cloud G) will be compatible the exact same. Also when you see older models (e.g. Maxi Cosi Tinca) newer models by the same brand (e.g. Maxi Cosi Pebble 360) will 99% of the time be compatible. Then you can extrapolate if for example Joie list that their prams take Maxi Cosi, Joie, Cybex and Recaro, but another pram company lists that their prams take Besafe, Avionaut, Maxi Cosi and Cybex, you can see that all these brands use the same system of adapter and should in theory be cross-compatible. There are a few rare cases where seats from a certain brand have an issue with the depth of the hooks or the adapters on certain models but this is very very few combinations. 99% of the time all works fine. (Avionaut work with this type of adapter, so no worries about finding a compatible pram.) You DO NOT NEED to spend upwards of £400 to get a good quality safe high performing car seat. About £150 without base, or £220 with base is about the going rate for the minimum here. IMO, it makes sense to consider whether any features you like (recline/inserts/weight/rotation) is worth whatever extra the cost is. You don't need a base which takes the next stage seat. It doesn't save money (unless you find a fantastic deal) and it's not more convenient. This is a con which only benefits the car seat company. There is one possible exception and that is Besafe Beyond. **Questions for you** You say a toddler car seat, but you're referencing infant carriers. How long are you hoping to use this first seat for? Do you plan on having more children? What do you actually want from a car seat, when you say it's a "good" seat, do you mean safety and quality or something else?

My firsts infant carrier was shit. It didn’t give a very supportive fit, and neither do most on the market. It’s shocking how awful some of them are. My second I wanted a fixed seat for, I got her an Avionaut Sky the same as my eldest went into when we got rid of his infant carrier. It gives a beautiful fit for average sized newborns, she was born 6lbs10oz and 46cm and the fit was better than the infant carrier we had previously. The Sky rear faces until 25kg/125cm, although can be outgrown sooner than expected if baby carries more height in their torso than legs as it has a shorter shell than other similar seats. My third was always going to go into eldests Sky when it was outgrown, so I got the Avionaut Cosmo for him. Also gave a beautiful fit. Never had any issues with chin to chest at all with either of my younger two. The Pixel Pro is also a great seat if baby is expected to be smaller than average.

The best infant car seats are the Avionaut Pixel Pro or Cosmo, or the BeSafe Go Beyond. All are reallly supportive and ergonomic from the smallest babies and are attached to almost all travel systems to. The Avionaut ones are really lightweight. The BeSafe Beyond second stage seat for the base has the highest weight limit for a rotating car seat on the market and should get all but the heaviest of children to a safe booster seat age, which is why we chose that and we loved the infant carrier. It’s one of the best baby purchases I’ve made and id recommend to anyone. Just a note on a lot of car seats which market themselves as newborn suitable (like theJoie Spin ones), newborns rarely get a good fit, so if you do want to go down the fixed seat route, you might want a cheaper infant carrier (like the Britax Baby Safe) to tide you until you get a good fit in the bigger seat.

Just to add to the Swedish Plus tested, infant carriers are seats aren’t plus tested but are generally very safe by the nature of their design. A small newborn won’t get a good fit in any 0-4/0-6 car seat and so if the baby is likely to be small, something like a Avionaut Cosmo could well be worth it until they fit into the bigger seat

For car seats, while basically all infant carrier are safe in crash tests because they all have the same basic concept, not all are supportive for newborns and especially tiny and premature babies. They can put babies in a chin to chest position which can restrict my their airways. And some seats have really bulky inserts which fit a newborn well but have an awkward transitional stage where they’ve outgrown the inserts but don’t fit properly in the seats. Some of the more supportive ones are Avionaut Pixel/Cosmo; BeSafe Go Beyond; Britax BabySafe; Maxi-Cosi Cabriofix; Cybex Cloud Z. You can sometimes get these seats in bundles.

I think some people like the car seat at the beginning as it keeps baby a bit more upright but tbh I never had that and never missed it and I had a very colic baby. For me the biggest benefit was having a car seat that lifted off so I could take him out of the car still in his car seat. I got a avionaut cosmo, doesn't swivel but that's safer and I wanted something super safe as a lot of roads where I am are rural 60mph. On the pram front the biggest appeal for me has been a frame that folds, I actually just got the joie finiti as once you're on the stroller nothing needs to come apart anymore it just folds in one, although if you weren't rural/ grass walks you could probably get a more compact one.

I have the Avionaut Cosmo because it was cheaper than the Pixel Pro and is just as highly recommended/safe. It’s so lightweight (8 week old is 6kg and I can still lift easily) and it supports her head really well, it has never rolled forward like you see with some car seats. There is a group on Facebook that you can send pictures in for a fit check if you’re ever concerned - Bump to Booster - UK car seat support (also lots of good recommendations on there too) I do not regret my choice at all! She looks so comfy in there…and trust me, she would let me know if she wasn’t!

Any seat will fit if it has universal adaptors and if it doesn't then you buy them for like £25. Avionaut Cosmo is a great budget option that is also one of the safest. I had the Maxi Cosi Cabriofix which is also a great budget seat and is safe but it has quite short limits so won't last you as long as the Cosmo which is probably the longest lasting infant carrier (or very close to).

A pram isn't a safety item. You want the bassinet to be certified for safe sleep as some babies sleep great in the pram. You want UV protection and for it to be easy to navigate on the terrain you're gonna push it on. Otherwise, it's a pram. Any will do. The car seat is a safety device. You need to invest more in safety items imo as it will save your baby's life should an accident occur, or as I tell my patients (midwife), you just need to brake a little too hard and baby could suffer serious injuries. The best of the best infant carrier is the Avionaut Pixel Pro. The Avionaut Cosmo is a great budget option. Isofix is not safer than belting in the seat but it is more convenient (I actually found it more hassle whereas my partner loved having the isofix base). I regret buying a whole travel system. So expensive and we bought a cheaper stroller which we now use all the time. If I could rewind time, I wouldn't have got sucked into buying a big bulky travel system.

It's not advised to have babies in an infant carrier (the one that attaches to the pram) for longer than 30 mins so unless it's a quick drive, in out the shop then it's not safe. We had the maxi cosi cabriofix which is a safe and bduget friendly option but it has low height/weight limits so she's outgrown it now at 10 months. The Avionaut Cosmo will last over a year though and around £130. I had a baby in September so the only bonus of the infant carrier is that you can easily bring it inside to keep it warm before putting a baby in. We switched to the Avionaut Sky (which is suitable from birth too) around 5/6 months and it's been great. Love this seat. Should last her until she's 5 at least.