This time, Design Center for the Baden-Württemberg International Design Award Focus Open awarded Monterey® 5iST FixSafe™ winner of the Gold Focus Open 2021.

Remember: Kids aren’t ready to ride with the seatbelt alone until they can fit properly. That’s usually between 10 and 12 years old. Sadly we see many more serious injuries in school age kids riding in the seatbelt than in young kids in car seats. Diono petitioned NHTSA on July 22, 2022, for an exemption from the notification and remedy requirements of 49 U.S.C. Chapter 301 on the basis that this noncompliance is inconsequential as it relates to motor vehicle safety, pursuant to 49 U.S.C. 30118(d) and 30120(h) and 49 CFR part 556, Growth. It may sound amazing to you right now, but the truth is: children outgrow their infant and toddler car seats really fast. Truly, in the blink of an eye. And so they will outgrow the headrest, harness, and legroom. To make sure your child is secure in his/her seat, you will eventually want to buy a booster seat;

Engineered with our most side impact protection - our rigid shell is reinforced with 8 layers of high-impact aluminum and EPS energy absorbing foam, to protect the head, shoulders, and torso. Easy-adjust - 11-position headrest that grows up with your child. Engineered for safety and comfort with 2 layers of Side Impact Protection. Will it actually fit a kid who is my height and 120lbs? At that point it’ll depend a lot on body structure, but rest assured it does get very, very wide. As with all boosters, you need to make sure that their ears are fully contained within the booster seat. The diono Monterey XT Fix Booster Car Seat is a really flexible car seat ideal for growing children. It has an extending headrest which can be adapted into 11 different positions and the seat has a really easy one-handed height adjustment.

Honouring the first collaboration between Diono and Berlin based design studio, WhiteID, Monterey® 5iST FixSafe™ combined our signature world-class American engineering with forward-thinking, edgy European design to create the next generation of child car seat. Monterey® 5iST FixSafe™ continued to turn heads across Europe, catching the attention of industry experts and innovators of the technology of tomorrow. There are a lot of similarities and key differences between the Diono Cambria 2 and Diono Monterey XT. Both models are high-end booster car seats made for children, with the Diono Monterey XT released as the successor to the Diono Monterey and the Diono Cambria 2 as the successor to the Diono Cambria. Differences Be convenient and easy for parents to install and clean. Lighter seats and those which were designed to handle easily can be moved in and out of the vehicle without any hassle. Narrow car seats will fit in almost all the cars. Also, a headrest needs to be easily adjusted and then stay in place when the booster is in use. Moreover, cleaning shouldn’t be a challenge, and wiping any mess from the booster seat and cupholders has to be simple. Diono LLC, (Diono), has determined that certain models of its child restraint systems do not fully comply with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 213,

Family Travel is Changing

Children grow at a fast rate, a booster seat that aims at accommodating such changes with comfort whilst protecting them on rides is needed. The booster seat has many utilities at its disposal for superior comfort and protection.

The Oobr is one of the narrowest booster seats available, so it’ll give you a good chance of fitting 3-across. With 9 years until expiration, it’s a great option for families with a younger sibling to pass it down to. Some of the premium fabrics offer serious stain protection to make clean-up easy with the inevitable spilled milk after the drive through. If that’s not as important to you, the Drift fabric is still nice and quite a bit cheaper. The material used for Diono Monterey XT’s energy-absorbing foam is the Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) which offers more durability than the Expanded Polyethylene (EPE) used in Diono Cambria 2.

We have the original KidFit Zip and we love it! Much like the Britax Highpoint Cool Flow, the Chicco KidFit Zip Air is built to keep kids cool. But the KidFit Zip has some amazing bonus features. For daily use my kids find the Diono Monterey 5iST to be very comfortable. My kids are spoiled by our fleet over extremely comfortable booster seats but they’re happy to ride in this one. It is a subjective matter, as some kids prefer a firmer ride or a squishier ride and different kids have different arm rest preferences. The other folding booster seat in our family’s fleet is the the hifold by mifold. You can read my full hifold review for tons of info. While the Monterey 5iST FixSafe is about making a traditional booster seat more compact and somewhat more travel-worthy, the hifold puts the travel aspect first. But there’s no clear winner between these two products, they’re just different beasts. To get the tiny fold, it requires a lot more fiddling and a multi-step adjustment process every time you unfold and set it up. In exchange for weight, the hifold doesn’t have lower anchors and doesn’t feel nearly as sturdy.