Thursday, February 27, 2014

2014 Honda Civic Coupe: Car Seat Check

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After redesigning the Civic sedan in 2013, Honda turned its attention to the Civic coupe for 2014, restyling the exterior. Although the two cars share a name, they're different in some respects — beyond door count. The Civic coupe is 177.9 inches long, and the sedan comes in at 179.4 inches. On the inside, the coupe has 42.2 inches of front legroom and 30.8 inches in the rear, while the sedan has 42.0 inches in front and a roomier 36.2 inches of rear legroom. The Civic coupe fared well in our Car Seat Check. Click here to find out how the sedan performed.

How many car seats fit in the second row? Two

More Car Seat Checks

What We Like
  • The two sets of lower Latch anchors are easy to access. They sit roughly a quarter inch into the seat cushions, which moved out of the way without any problems.
  • The forward-facing convertible fit well in the Civic coupe, but we struggled with connecting the tether strap to its anchor.
  • The outboard rear seats are heavily bolstered, but this worked well with our high-back booster seat. The bolsters held it snugly in place.

What We Don't

  • The head restraints are removable after the rear seats are folded forward, but levers to fold them are located in the trunk.
  • The tether anchors, which are on the rear shelf behind the head restraints, are difficult to use because of the coupe's sloping rear window. There's just not a lot of room for maneuvering, which made it difficult to tighten the tether strap once we hooked the connector onto the anchor.
  • While both the rear-facing infant and convertible seats installed easily, we had to move the front passenger seat forward to accommodate them. This left our tester feeling squeezed in the front seat.
  • The outboard seats have floppy seat belt buckles that fell behind our booster seat. This would lead to lots of frustration for younger kids trying to buckle up independently.

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Grading Scale

A: Plenty of room for the car seat and the child; doesn't impact driver or front-passenger legroom. Easy to find and connect to Latch and tether anchors. No fit issues involving head restraint or seat contouring. Easy access to the third row.

B: Plenty of room. One fit or connection issue. Some problems accessing third row when available.

C: Marginal room. Two fit or connection issues. Difficult to access third row when available.

D: Insufficient room. Two or more fit or connection issues.

F: Does not fit or is unsafe.

About Cars.com's Car Seat Checks

Editors Jennifer Geiger and Jennifer Newman are certified child safety seat installation technicians.

For the Car Seat Check, we use a Graco SnugRide 30 infant-safety seat, a Britax Roundabout convertible seat and Graco TurboBooster seat. The front seats are adjusted for a 6-foot driver and a 5-foot-8 passenger. The three child seats are installed in the second row. The booster seat sits behind the driver's seat, and the infant and convertible seats are installed behind the front passenger seat.

We also install the forward-facing convertible in the second row's middle seat with the booster and infant seat in the outboard seats to see if three car seats will fit; a child sitting in the booster seat must be able to reach the seat belt buckle. If there's a third row, we install the booster seat and a forward-facing convertible. To learn more about how we conduct our Car Seat Checks, go here.

Parents should also remember that they can use the Latch system or a seat belt to install a car seat, and that Latch anchors have a weight limit of 65 pounds, including the weight of the child and the weight of the seat itself.

Cars.com photos by Evan Sears



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