Review // Ickle Bubba Solar ISOFIX Car Seat

We have spent the past few months putting the Ickle Bubba Solar ISOFIX Car Seat through its paces. On the whole, we’ve been impressed with the car seat; it has travelled all around the UK with us, joining us on our adventures to Scotland, all over Yorkshire and will be coming to Wales with us in a few weeks time.

Ickle Bubba are not a brand I’d heard of previously, but they make a plethora of baby-related goodies: from pushchairs to cotbeds, and of course, car seats.

The Solar car seat is a forward facing Group 1-2-3 car seat, which means it’s designed for children from 9kg to 36kg. This is fantastic as it means it’s the only seat you need to buy from 9 months to 12 years!

We’ve been testing the car seat with Busby, so have been using it in the middle ‘2’ setting with the seatbelt (for approximate ages 3 years to 7 years).

The Solar is an ISOFIX car seat – so it’s incredibly easy to install into the car and I love that it has a green indicator to show that it’s installed correctly. The fact that it’s ISOFIX also means that taking it in and out of the car is incredibly simple, which is useful when swapping over into grandparents’ cars. The top tether makes the seat even more safe; giving you extra peace of mind.

The Solar is a very smart seat and comes in three different colourways: black, dark grey and light grey (ours is light grey). It’s also made from luxury, stay cool fabric; making it perfect for those warmer days and longer journeys.

Busby really likes how comfy the Solar is and that the seat is higher up than her previous one, so she can see more out of the window! Also, she can now reach her chair tray table in the car.

Your child is fastened with a 5 point safety harness in the first stage of the car seat; with shoulder, lap and crotch straps. The seat also has three reclining positions:

• upright
• mid-recline
• full recline.

Although we have been impressed with the Ickle Bubba car seat, we’ve found the instruction book to be quite confusing:

• For example, when trying to convert the seat from the delivered stage 1 to our desired stage 2, I found myself having to get a second opinion from Nick a number of times because it wasn’t always clear where to remove the straps from. The straps were also very fiddly to remove – and took over 30 minutes to change from stage 1 to stage 2. This is great in terms of safety if you’re initially using the car seat from stage 1, because they are very securely fastened!
• Also, the instructions to show you how to thread the seat belt through the red safety slot at the top of the seat aren’t the clearest, so there was one occasion where Busby pulled the seatbelt and it became slacker and didn’t feed back into the dispenser properly – resulting in us having to stop and readjust after realising we’d threaded it through wrong. I’ve included two comparison photos below to show you how it should be fed through correctly.

The Ickle Bubba Solar ISOFIX is a great car seat that grows as your child grows. It’s very smart looking and we love the stay cool fabric! Busby adores it – and it’s made her journeys much more comfortable.

The seat is also tested & approved in accordance with regulation ECE R44/04.

The Ickle Bubba Solar ISOFIX Car Seat is reasonably priced for a stage 1-2-3 car seat with a RRP of £169. This also includes two window sun visors for your car. Please visit the Ickle Bubba website to find out more about the Ickle Bubba Solar ISOFIX Car Seat.

Hannah