Sentry Baby Products Guardimals

The Sentry Guardimals does not perform well in our ease-of-use, fit-to-vehicle, or crash protection evaluations. Some instructions do not match product use. The forward-facing harness belt path is unintuitive and overly complicated. Its fun animal designs may encourage kids to use the seat for longer.

Consumer Reports’ car seat crash test, developed in 2014, provides comparative performance information on which car seats could provide an additional margin of safety.  All child seats sold in the United States are required to meet government safety standards, and Consumer Reports’ tests are not designed to test compliance with those standards.  Rather, we evaluate the seats’ performance under conditions designed by our experts to simulate certain crash scenarios, and rate them on a scale ranging from “basic” to “best.”  The test conditions have been carefully designed to simulate the interior environment and forces encountered during a crash in contemporary vehicles. For more information on our crash test protocol, please click here.

The Sentry Baby Products Guardimals is part of the Car Seats test program at Consumer Reports. In our lab tests, Toddler-Booster Seat models like the Guardimals are rated on multiple criteria, such as those listed below.

Ease of use: Our judgment of how easy each seat is to use including the clarity of the labels and instructions, adjustments of clips and buckles, the transition of the seat between harness and booster modes and installation features such as LATCH connections and top tethers.

Fit-to-vehicle LATCH: A rating of how easy it is to securely and correctly install each seat, in the harnessed mode, using the LATCH system in a variety of vehicles and how well they fit each vehicle once installed.

Fit-to-vehicle belt: A rating of how easy it is to securely and correctly install each seat, in the harnessed mode, using the vehicle seat belts in a variety of vehicles and how well they fit each vehicle once installed.