Can an Infant Car Seat Fit in a Subaru BRZ?

I have a two month old and a very small sports car (Subaru BRZ). Can an infant car seat fit in this or will the baby require the biggest expense yet in a new car?

Background

Back in 2013, my wife got a job far enough away from where we lived that we needed two cars. She'd bought the last one so we started shopping around for what I wanted. The cars I settled on were:

• Hyundai Genesis Coupe
• Chevrolet Camaro
• Lotus Elise
• Subaru BRZ

None of these cars are baby-friendly, but we weren't planning to have a baby for a couple of years so that was a problem for future me.

I settled on the 2013 BRZ, and as you can see from the picture above, the backseat is basically non-existent. Was there any hope of fitting a rear-facing, infant seat in there?

Options

After doing some measurements, I found that I had ~29 inches to work with and found two potential candidates:

• Britax B-Safe 35
• Chicco Keyfit 30

We tried them out at the local Babies "R" Us, and felt that the Chicco was the most promising.

Results

Below are several pictures of how it fits:

View from driver's side door

View from passenger's side door. Note that the gap between the two seats is sufficient.

Evidence that the seat angle is safe

Working in our favor is that the backseat has hooks for the seat base, the front seat slides very far forward on the passenger side, and there is a gap between the seat back and the door opening that makes it easy to get the seat in and out. Working against us is the shape of the back seat (it slopes down sharply), the fact that it's only two doors, and the fact that the seat on the driver side doesn't slide forward as far as I'd like to be able to easily get into the backseat on that side.

To handle the angle of the backseat, I took old shirts and used them to flatten out the seat a bit (they're stacked under the seat base with the stack being thicker as the seat sinks in). The Chico base is adjustable, but I didn't find a setting that worked perfectly for this.

To get him in, it's easiest to pull the seat off the base, put him in it, then put the seat back into the base (we often do this with my wife's 4-door also as it's convenient). You can also get in the backseat on the driver's side and put him in there if you prefer.

As is probably obvious from the pictures, the front passenger seat is somewhat useless, but my wife gets sick when she rides in this car anyway, so that's a non-issue for us as we always use her car if we're both in the same car.

Conclusion

If you don't need to use the front passenger seat and can afford to spend >$200 on a car seat, this isn't too bad and the Chicco Keyfit 30 works for me.

Note that all of this also applies to the Scion FR-S.