Best Rotating Car Seats

A number of infant, convertible, and all-in-one car seats currently offer a revolving feature. They performed the best overall of the rotating seats we tested, and they’re recommended within their respective categories.

Rotating a car seat to face a car door can help with the loading, unloading, and harnessing of a child simply because you don’t have to do these tasks at an angle or lean into the car. That straight-on view can be helpful to ensure that the harness is positioned and tightened correctly before then swiveling the seat back to the position the child will ultimately travel in.

Some of these seats also offer a second advantage: Once the base is installed, you don’t have to remove it to transition the seat between rear- and forward-facing orientations. Essentially, you won’t have to relearn how to install the seat to make that change.

That said, there are a few things you should know before you buy a rotating car seat:

• Rotating child seat models aren’t inexpensive. Of the ones we tested, most were more than $399, with the most expensive going for $750. With the average price of both convertible and all-in-one models around $290, these seats come at a premium. 
• Because the seat rotates, you’ll need to check that the shell is locked securely to the base in the appropriate direction before you travel.
• They are among the heaviest seats in their categories. When combining the base and shell, these seats often weigh more than average models. If moving a child seat between vehicles is something you need to do often, these may not be right for you.
• These are not well-suited to small cars, where the combination of the base and shell means that the seats may take up more room on the rear seat and sit higher. This may mean limited space for passengers seated in front of them or contact between the seat and the vehicle ceiling. And as your child grows, it may be more cumbersome for them to climb into a bulky car seat rather than one that has a slimmer profile.
• Unlike rear-facing only infant seats that can be removed from their base and used separately, several of the rotating infant car seats in our tests are unable to be removed from the base and don’t double as an infant carrier.

As with all child car seats that Consumer Reports tests, the rotating ones in our ratings were evaluated for ease of use, including how clear the manufacturer’s installation instructions are, how easy the installation itself is, and how simple it is to adjust the harness. We also assessed fit-to-vehicle by installing car seats in all unique rear-seat positions of five family vehicle types.

CR also works with an outside lab to test car seats for their crash protection. The lab conducts simulated 35-mile-per-hour frontal crashes and evaluates each car seat’s potential for providing an additional margin of safety beyond the federal standard.

Finally, our scale ranks seats from those that have the least to the most additional safety on a scale of Basic, Better, and Best.