Transcription
Hey gang, welcome back to the Destination Baby and Kids YouTube channel. This is Gina, I am your host, and I'm very excited to be here with you today to go over the Cybex Cloud T infant seat. So this is very, very exciting. This is a car seat, uh, an infant seat from Cybex that will hold from 4 lbs all the way up to 30 lbs and 32 inches long, so that you'd easily take kiddo through 12 months, maybe even up to 18, uh, depending on how big they get. So this is very exciting.
Um, so let's launch into the seat. And again, if it makes sense, go ahead and hit like, go ahead and follow, go ahead and subscribe. The greater I grow my viewing audience, the easier it is for me to grab this stuff from the brands to be able to show you guys and teach you everything that I know about it and be able to review it thoughtfully for you. So every view counts, every viewer matters. We thank all of our current subscribers and viewers; we love you guys so much. And if it also makes sense, if you want to buy this product directly from me, head on over to my website, destinationkids.com. I am a real store in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. You could also book an appointment for stroller and car seat help under stroller car seat consultation directly there. You could do virtual or you could do in person, whatever makes you happy. Check it out, uh, on my website, destinationbabkids.com.
All right, let's launch into the car seat. So what are we looking at? We are looking at a brand new infant seat. So it will go from 4 lbs all the way through to 30 lbs, like I said, and it will hold a 32-inch long body. I'm going to go ahead and bring this guy over to the camera. It will include one base in the purchase price of $550. So what's special about this new model? As you can see, there's way more fabric all along the exterior of the car seat, which was part of the reason why I showed this in gray. Um, I did have a black one as well; they come in a host of different colors, but you can see a little bit more easily some of these cool fashion features that make the seat look a little softer than it had looked in previous iterations. So we love that. We're still going to have our linear side impact protection. This is very, very exciting. Cybex absolutely leads the way on this type of, uh, side impact protection. They do stuff with the ADC, which is a German Auto Club; they do testing through there in addition to testing in the United States. So the linear side impact protection was something they did for ADC, but it does help reduce, uh, energy in an accident by about 30%—side impact energy in those accidents. So very cool safety feature.
And then if we look on the front of the seat, another thing that's nice is the handle movement backward and forward has been made easier, so that joint is smoother. Really appreciate that. And you can see the fabrics here—super premium. And then also here, the headpiece—I don't know if you guys can see, but it is a mesh ventilation; it is all flame retardant free. So we love that. Um, but the mesh goes through all the way into—I'm going to take out the infant pillow—into the body of the seat, so it's kiddo gets bigger; it's going to be quite breathable. And then the plastic itself on the seat has perforation, so it is a super breathable seat without compromising any of the safety with the bike helmet foam on the inside of the seat; they just work around that. So similar to their new Kalisto 360 rotating seat, this seat won't rotate, but it does have that fabulous, uh, more breathable material which, in the past on their other models, hasn't been, uh, available. So if you were between this and like the Cloud G or the Cloud G Lux, I would definitely push you into a Cloud T. I think the extra cost is justified just based on the nicer materials alone, but also on some of the things the seat can do and those easier mechanisms. So we really appreciate that.
Another thing that's typical on this guy that's going to be typical on, uh, the higher-end Cybex seats is the SensorSafe on the chest. That is a Bluetooth component that you can hook up with an app to your phone. It will tell you if the kiddo's undone their chest piece; it will tell you if they are too hot or too cold; and it will also tell you if you've accidentally left your child in the car. So if you are a multiple-child family or this is just something that you think would be a nice feature to have because it's easy to forget things—really, really nice feature that you could use that if you wanted to. Now, that being said, you don't have to use that feature if you don't care about that feature, then just don't engage it.
Um, I'm going to go ahead—what I meant to do is grab my little baby because I want to show you guys one really cool feature of the seat. I'm going to go ahead and put kiddo in the car seat. And again, this is an exclusively rear-facing car seat, obviously for infants. The law in California is that they have to remain backward for the first two years of their life, so this seat will help you get to that. You won't go the full two years in this seat, but I'd say easily the first year and then probably beyond that, still usable—14, 16, possibly even 18 months because you do get a full 32 inches out of the seat. Everyone fixates on how much weight a seat can hold; they really need to be more concerned with the height of the seat—how long of a body it can accommodate—because even if it holds a 30-lb kid, if the seat is not comfortable for a kiddo's long body, who cares? Comfort is a big part of this. So a nice feature on the seat is that it is very comfortable. It does have a 12-position headrest adjustment, so there's a single piece that will raise the headrest up and down, and then the shoulder harness moves along with the headrest. So unlike, let's say Nuna, that does a manual rethread harness where you're responsible to rethread it, this is an easy movement up and down—no rethread harness. So very, very nice feature that's included directly, uh, in the purchase price of this seat. I did have a cheat sheet for this guy; not sure where I put it, but that's okay. Purchase price on the seat, like I said, is going to be $549.95, and it will include, uh, one of the bases that I'm about to show you right now. So the seat will install with or without the base, so you don't need this part to use that in the car; we'll show you that. But the base is included, and it's Cybex's most intense base that they sell in the United States. So you're going to get, um, a stability load leg; you have an anti-rebound plate; you have a rigid latch installation; um, there's the Comfort mode for the seat, which we're going to go into in just a minute. The infant insert is included, but the biggest thing I think with this base is going over the safety features of it for you because I think this is a really complicated and convoluted thing when we talk about seats having better or worse safety features; that can all sound like something that somebody just makes up to make you feel guilty. So I want to show you, my viewing audience, what the hell we're talking about. Are you ready? I am ready. Let's get into it.
So this base from Cybex is insane. Okay, so this base has a very, very exaggerated anti-rebound plate; it has a stability load leg; and then it also has—I'm going to see if we can set this up to be flat—there we go—it's also going to have—you can see metal; it's not attached to a flexible piece of nylon. A lot of times when customers come in the store and they see a base like this, they're like, "I don't want anything to do with that; that's horrifying; put that away; that's so much going on; let's not talk about it; just get it out of my sight." So I understand that this can look really overwhelming compared to like bases of the past—a little dirty Graco base, gross—um, but for the benefit of this video, I'm going to show you Cybex's lowest-end car seat versus their highest-end car seat. I don't think it's fair to play against different brands. I mean, I totally do for my customers in the store, um, but when we're doing these kind of videos, I think it's most useful to show brand over brand in terms of safety differences with different models because stuff at different price points are all going to do different things. So Cybex also makes an infant seat that has a base that looks like this. Okay, so this base is way less stuff going on; there's no foot; there's no stability plate; and our lower anchors are set with flexible nylon; they're not on like a rigid piece of metal. Okay, so not a big deal, but here in our back seat, and if you don't know much about car seats—vehicle seats—I do have a video about that, but I'm going to assume that you have a little bit of basic knowledge for this. I'm going to install this base using my lower anchor. Every car 2003 and newer has a lower anchor anchor attachment; it's just a way to install a car seat without using a seat belt. We could do a belt installation on either of these, but for the purpose of this video, lower anchor is going to make the most sense. I'm going to go ahead and hook up one side; I need to give myself—I probably should have preset this before doing this, but you guys are so patient—wonderful. I'm going to lengthen my lower anchor strap; I'm going to hook it in; and now I'm going to go ahead and tighten because the whole idea here is I don't want my base moving more than an inch from its installation point. So installing it right now, I'm pulling it pretty tight. The idea is—and then we have this little piece here to really—it's like a leveraging arm that you lock down in order to make this insanely tight. So as you see, the whole vehicle seat is moving when I try and move this piece right now; it shouldn't move more than an inch from its installation point, so that's great. Okay, great. So here's another Cybex car seat; I have a baby in this one too. This one doesn't have the ventilation in the actual material; we do have some perforation in the plastic of the seat, but no ventilation in the regular material. So again, that new material is pretty awesome. And then also on the side here, it's just plastic; there's no fabric, and you see the scratches and things happen with this, so definitely nice on the new guy that you have that. But we'll go ahead and put our car seat in here, and baby's locked in—locked and loaded. Okay, great.
So what do we care about those extra safety features? Well, on this basic seat, it was installed correctly; it's ready to go; we're going to be driving, heading forward, and of course my baby is facing backward. If I stop for something, the FMVSS 2113—the only test that they do in the US—is on a sled running into a fixed point at 30 mph. Okay, so at a year old, a kid's head is fully developed into an adult head size; that's why little kids' heads look so hilarious. I mean, that sounds terrible, but it's like an adult head on this little weird body, which is adorable, but the point of the story is their head is really heavy in comparison to the rest of their body, right? So we're driving along, and we stop for an animal; we don't even hit the animal, but let's run the science, right? An object in motion—that's me as the driver—remains in motion unless it's acted on by another object; that's going to be my seat belt. And then we know for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, and that is called whiplash. On a car seat, it's referred to as rebound. So again, think about that kid's head being very, very heavy in relationship to their body. We're driving this way; we stop; the seat will want to surge forward; it's not going to be able to do that because of how tightly we've installed it; that's great, right? We don't want that seat moving around; we want as long as possible to take for the energy from the crash to come through and hit the body of the kiddo because the longer time that we can have between the crash and that energy transferring to them, the more it dissipates; the less, uh, intense it becomes. So we're driving; we stop; there's that initial surge forward; the seat won't be able to move forward; what's going to happen is it's actually going to start to arc downward because the head is so heavy. So the seat would have—whoops—a movement like this where it's going to go that way, and then all of the energy is going to store in the soft of the upholstery. So all down the seat's going to come back up in the opposite direction because all that energy that's stored in the soft of the upholstery of the seat is now going to release, and the seat will have what's called rebound. So the seat will come up like this. Okay, so this is me just in the store. You saw how tightly I had installed that; it was a correct installation, but the seat can have lift and this much movement on a seat that is acceptable from the US government to take your baby home from the hospital. Okay, I am not saying this is a good test; I'm saying this is the only test that's done. They are starting to add a new side impact piece to it that hasn't been done yet, and even when it becomes ready and going, seats are still going to have like 3 to 5 years to become compliant. So what this is showing you is what is an acceptable amount of rebound according to the government. Okay, forget those guys; they can't be trusted, right? Especially not with this type of important stuff like our kiddos. So we'll take the car seat—no, you can trust them for other stuff; it's just we're capable of doing better testing, and we don't do it, um, which is definitely sad. Now, any car seat is better than no car seat, and a backward-facing seat is still 80% safer than a forward-facing seat, but we were talking about safety features on the base, right? Because I think the misunderstanding is that since all car seats pass the same safety standard, they therefore all perform identically, right? They won't perform identically. This is a fully different thing than the other base I just showed you. This base is really intense with like a lot of stuff going on. Let's talk—talk about the value of that in an accident. So Cloud T: we take our metal pieces; we shove them forward; line them up; hook them up with our lower anchors on each side; and this one—there we go—there are windows on the side also that turn green once they've attached. I'm going to go ahead and tighten this by pressing it in with my adult strength, so I'm going to make that as tight as possible. And then typically the load leg comes down and touches the floor, and the window on the load leg will also turn green when it's correctly installed. So I've got a green window here, a green window here, a green window up here at the top, but also a green window on the bottom to let me know that all my points of contact are attached correctly. When I pull on the seat again, not moving an inch from side to side or up and down, so this is a correct installation. Now, go ahead and take baby in the Cloud T, and let's run that same accident. Okay, we're driving; we stop for the cat in the road; I'm still going to surge forward; my seat belt's going to catch me; and then I'm going to slam back. The car seat—it's the same exact thing as before; their head's the heaviest part of the body; the seat's going to want to rotate down toward the ground; have that initial arc downward; that is the value of a bar that comes down and touches the floor. If the seat can't ever get that momentum to roll forward, there's no opportunity for it to slam back up the way that the other seat did. So rebound on here is mitigated initially, primarily. So our primary force is mitigated by the load leg; secondary force—where the seat slams back—that's why we have this very exaggerated foot plate that's called an anti-rebound plate that came up because if, for some reason, there's failure here—I don't know, maybe you're in a rollover, who knows what kind of accident it is—but the point of the story is because this plate is so exaggerated, even if I am able to lift up from underneath, the actual physics of this plate being so large makes this lift extremely limited compared to the other seat that we just saw. Now, the rigid lower anchors mean if we're struck from the side, and again we would have our linear side impact pieces engaged, if we are struck from the side, that lower anchor being, um, rigid instead of on flexible nylon means that the seat's going to bang around way less; we're not going to have what's called fishtailing where the head bops around 'cause it's like a fish tail, right, flopping around; we don't want their head acting like a pinball. Now, we still have bike helmet foam throughout the entire seat, so in terms of safety it's still awesome, but let's still mitigate that kind of movement. So this is what you're looking for; this is what's very exciting on this style of seat from them, and that is why I would always advocate with Cybex going with their nicest seat, like Cloud T. You get the best breathable fabric; you get all the safety bells and whistles; and another nice feature is you don't lose out on this safety when you go to a baseless install. Now, you're not going to get the rigid lower anchor, but you still are going to get an ability to have some of that rebound mitigated if you do what's referred to as European belt routing method. Also, this seat can go into an airplane without the base, so you can just bring it as is directly onto an airplane; you could check the base, or you could just—when you got to your destination—set the seat up in the way I'm going to show you. You take your seat belt; you align it wherever there is blue on the car seat; you buckle your belt. So now this would be enough for on the airplane; you tighten, but in a car you're actually going to come around the back of the seat, and it tucks into the blue piece back there. What this will do—when this is locked off, meaning you've pulled the belt out and pulled it all the way back—the belt will be locked. So if you try and move the seat at all, it's not going to dip downward because we have this piece coming up over the back. And the other nice piece is that we can still engage our linear side impact protection even when we're using the seat without the base, so you still get an anti-rebound feature; you still get a side impact feature on the seat even when you're using it without the base. So that is all super fabulous.
Now, getting into, uh, the most important feature that's a comfort feature—oh gosh, this car seat has seen nicer days—this vehicle seat—this vehicle seat was donated by Nuna, so you might see that it says Nuna on it. This isn't, um, a Nuna car seat that I'm actually putting in this vehicle seat, but Nuna was gracious enough to send these out to stores, so shout out to them; they make a great car seat too. But very useful to be able to demonstrate other car seats on it. Um, and Nuna bases, like the Cybex base, has a rigid latch, a stability load leg, and an anti-rebound plate, very similar to like what you see there. So in terms of safety, they understand that having those additional safety features is important, and you're going to see that these features are on a multitude of brands: your Peg Perego, uh, 435 car seat; the, uh, Lounge that has it; the Cybex has it; the Clek has a stability load leg; uh, the Nuna has a stability load leg and anti-rebound plate; the Primo 180 from Maxi-Cosi has both of those pieces. So this is not like Cybex is the only brand that's doing this, but it's really important to understand why we would say one seat might make more sense for you in terms of having additional safety features and how…
Those safety features actually operate in an accident, and why there are price differences between products. It's not just like, hey, they're all exactly the same; get whatever you want. There will be differences. Okay, so now getting into the last part of this conversation which I want to talk about, I am going to cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat.
So this is a Nuna stroller; this is the Nuna Demi next. You've ever seen me talk about the stroller; it's one of my favorite options for a single to a double, which means it's a single stroller sometimes, and then you can turn it into a two-kid stroller. Now, now something that Nuna's traditionally been known for is that they only work with Nuna car seats. So if you have a Nuna stroller, you can't buy a Cybex car seat; you can't buy any other brand car seat. It's only going to work with Nuna.
Demi next is particularly fabulous because you can actually do a variety of car seats on it. It comes with a set of secret adapters which most customers don't understand; they call them the lower adapters, but I'm going to go ahead and put them on the top, and I'm going to show you why this car seat, for me, is a home run. When I take this car seat and put it on the stroller, just like that, locks on. If I'm going out all day, it's not good to have kiddo in a V-shape. So we tell people, "WR," like you can buy a bassinet or you can buy an insert for the seat to make it flatter, and then you can use it for a newborn. Nooo, I would definitely say just buy their bassinet, or they would tell you to use their infant car seat directly on the stroller frame.
Now what I want is the ability to have my kid in here and go out all day and not feel guilty that I need to bring an additional piece because having their body in a V-shape, that a car seat holds them folded like this, is not ideal. What's better is to have them flat. This car seat's going to do that. There's a squeeze pincher on the back, and then the seat just goes flat. So now kiddo, who was very V-shaped before, is in a totally flat option, which is pretty unbelievable. This is opening up their neck and airway; it's opening up their belly; it's giving them that room to breathe. It's also probably significantly more comfortable for a long day to be able to have multiple positions for your kiddo. So Cloud te is going to give you that lay-down option for when it's on the stroller or on the floor. This is not a lay-down option for in the car; in the car, it does have to be in its upright, crash-tested uh, position. And luckily for you, it will not even click into its base if you do it the wrong way; it would have to be done the correct way. So they've sort of planned against that, but a nice feature. They're locked in; they fall asleep; their head's coming down like this; it doesn't look very comfortable. As a parent or caregiver, you can go ahead and just recline it, and now the seat is in a fully reclined mode and ready to just hang out and not disturb kiddo. We can just chill. So very, very nice feature set that's available on Cloud te that is not available on um, a lot of other car seats.
There's only one other reclining car seat; it's made by Peg Perego. It is a very nice seat; has a lot of safety features that you'd see very similarly to this, but I would argue that this recline on this seat is a deeper recline, so um, it just goes a little fat flatter than Peg Perego. Now I'd still, still say speak with your pediatrician about checking on kiddo. This is not a substitute for overnight sleeping, but if we didn't want to feel us guilty about having them in the car seat all day and we see ourselves realistically doing a lot of errands with a car seat, having a reclining car seat is a great feature. And with all the additional safety bells and whistles that you would get with Cybex at the same price as a Nuna Pipa Air RX and having the ability to have a no-rethread harness, the headpiece moves up and down along with the shoulder piece, all the bike helmet breathable material, flame retardant free, this is going to be a really hard value to beat. So again, um, thank you so much for watching. Very cool option. Cybex does make their own single to double called the Priam. Cybex makes lots of their own strollers, so if you want to check those out, head on over to my website, destinationbabykids.com. But again, we just wanted to show you how cool this seat was, how workable it is with a broad variety of products and just a really fun offering for 2025, coming to you from Destination Baby and Kids. All right, thanks so much, and please be sure to check us out in other car seat or stroller videos.