The best car seat is the one that fits your child, vehicle, budget, and lifestyle and has the features important to you. The safest car seat is the one you can install correctly and use properly on every ride! Let us know in the comment section what questions you have about this review of the Nuna Pipa RX car seat. And if you want to compare car seats and let us help you find your recommended car seats, our Car Seat Buying Kits are your best bet!

Nuna Pipa RX Car Seat Review (USA)

The Nuna Pipa RX is recognized for its notable safety features, sleek design, and ease of use. With a focus on providing optimal protection for your child, it incorporates advanced safety technologies like rigid lower anchors, an anti-rebound bar, and a load leg, ensuring efficient absorption and distribution of crash forces. Furthermore, the Nuna Pipa RX seamlessly integrates with various well-known stroller brands, facilitating effortless travel system compatibility. As a result, it remains a preferred option for parents who value safety, convenience, and aesthetic appeal when selecting a car seat.

---

*Head to the Car Seat Buying Kits for a complete database of all car seat stats for our recommended car seats.

---

✅ Seat is Good for You If:

✅ You are looking for a seat with extra safety features.

This seat has a load leg, rigid lower anchors, and an anti-rebound panel. These features enhance stability, reduce rotation, and help absorb crash forces, providing an added layer of protection for the child.

✅ You would like a car seat with flame-retardant-free fabric.

All of the Nuna Pipa RX fabric options are flame-retardant-free, so you can choose any color that you prefer!

✅ You want a seat with an easy installation.

If you are someone who moves your seats around a lot or maybe you have struggled with installing car seats in the past, this might be the infant seat for you. The Nuna Pipa RX can be installed with rigid lower anchors on the outboard seats of most vehicles. This is the easiest way to install it. But it has a seat belt lock-off for those who prefer to use a center seat (and most center seats do not have lower anchor points). This lock-off makes the seat belt installation very simple as well.

✅ You have a vehicle with seats that have limited depth.

Some trucks have back seats that are shorter, which can potentially lead to overhang problems. When utilizing the load leg feature, this seat allows over 20% of the base to extend beyond the vehicle seat.

🚩 Use Caution If:

🚩 You have a vehicle that doesn’t allow the use of load legs.

There are a handful of vehicles that do not allow load legs to be used. Vans with stow-and-go seating and some trucks with underfloor storage will sometimes forbid the use of load legs. Check your vehicle owner’s manual for more information.

️ Stand Out Features:

Anti-rebound Panel

The base has an anti-rebound bar (ARB) built into it. The anti-rebound bar is an added safety feature for rear-facing that can reduce the secondary movement of the car seat, called rebound, during a crash. When a collision occurs, the car seat will move forward, towards the front of the vehicle, and rotate downward. And as we all know from high school physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction — so after that initial movement, the car seat will rebound, or “bounce back” towards the backrest of the vehicle seat. The ARB minimizes this bounce-back effect, helping limit the car seat movement and your child inside it! ARBs may also limit the side-to-side rotation of the car seat in a side-impact collision. Overall, it’s a great feature on a rear-facing car seat!

load leg

A load leg is a metal pole that comes down from a rear-facing car seat and rests on the vehicle’s floor. Load legs reduce crash forces which offer additional protection, especially for your child’s head, neck, and spine. 

rigid lower anchors

Unlike flexible lower anchors on the end of a strap, these anchors are steel bars that protrude out directly from the steel frame of the car seat and attach to your vehicle’s lower anchor points. This connection style is generally considered a user-friendly install. When done correctly (which is easy to do), it creates an extremely tight connection (no movement) between the car seat and the vehicle, which is a very good thing in the land of child passenger safety.

Seat Belt Lock-off

If you want to install your car seat in the middle and your middle seat does not have lower anchor points, then you will need to do a seat belt installation. The base has a lock-off that makes this installation very simple as well.

European Seat Belt Routing for Baseless Mode

This seat can be installed baseless with European or American/Standard belt routing. You can find a video showing both of those methods here. The European routing method is preferred! European belt routing means the shoulder belt portion of the seat belt is routed behind the shell of the rear-facing seat, limiting its ability to rotate down in a frontal crash. This routing functions similar to a load leg. Pretty cool, huh?!

Ability to Change to Recline Without Uninstalling the Seat

This is one of only a few infant seats on the market that allows you to change the recline of the seat without uninstalling the base.

▶️ YouTube Videos:

▶️ What’s The Best Baby Car Seat? Nuna Pipa RX vs. Clek Liing

▶️ How to Install Nuna Pipa RX

⚠️ Quirks to Be Aware Of:

⚠️The Sky Drape should not be used in full sun.

It does significantly raise the temperature that the baby is exposed to.

---

✈️ Airplane Use

The Nuna Pipa RX is a recommended choice for both domestic and international travel as it is FAA-approved. When traveling within the United States and Canada, installing the seat without the base is a breeze, as the seat belts in these countries have locking mechanisms that ensure a secure fit. For international travel, it is recommended to pack the base in your luggage and utilize its seat belt lock-off or lower anchors for installation because, typically, seat belts in other countries will not lock. If you choose not to travel with the base, you will need to contact the manufacturer for a locking clip and learn how to use it before you travel.

For help with all things airplane travel and car seats, check out our Wheels Up Course and private Facebook group.

SITS Bottom Line

The Nuna Pipa RX is an excellent option for newborns of any size, including preemies! Overall, the Nuna Pipa RX sets a high standard for infant car seats, delivering exceptional safety, convenience, and style. With its advanced safety technologies and ease of installation, it provides parents with peace of mind and a hassle-free experience, making it a top contender for those seeking a reliable and stylish car seat for their little ones.

Other Versions of this Seat:

Nuna Pipa (US) – different base without anti-rebound bar and with different recline mechanism, 9.4 pounds

Nuna Pipa Lite RX (US) – rethread harness, weighs 6.9 pounds. Has the same base

Nuna Pipa Urbn* (US) – only comes as part of a travel system, baseless seat that has rigid lower anchors incorporated into the carrier, weighs 9.3 pounds, has 22 pound/29″ limit

Nuna Pipa (Canada) – no load leg, has a level line on the carrier

Stokke Pipa (US) – same as Nuna Pipa, but has Stokke stroller adapter built-in

Bugaboo Turtle Air (US) – same as the Nuna Pipa Lite Rx, but has Bugaboo stroller adapter built-in

*A SITS recommended seat. Recommended seats are in our Buying Kits because they have ranked high on our vehicle, child, ease of use, and features scales.

Compare Car Seats

Looking to compare car seats and narrow down the best car seat for your family? The Infant Car Seat Buying Kit walks you through our 7Cs of selection, then on to an interactive quiz, and finally, a recommended car seat list is generated just for you! If you are overwhelmed and sick of spending hours researching and reading car seat reviews like this one, the Buying Kit will guide you to Safe in the Seat’s recommended car seats for you in under 30 minutes!

We check every day for our recommended car seats on sale, and we have all the deals here for you. Shopping in Canada? Find today’s seat sales in Canada here.

What About Seats We Don’t Recommend?

Just like anyone, we have preferences! This goes for car seats, too. If we don’t recommend a car seat, it’s not because it’s unsafe for your little one. All car seats are safe if they’re installed and used properly, are not expired or damaged, and when they’re made and sold by a reputable manufacturer and/or retailer. Click here for our full list of car seats that we do not recommend.

A note about crash-tests

How does the Nuna Pipa RX perform in crash tests? 

Well, that’s a great question. We know that it passes the strict federally required testing that applies to all car seats sold in the United States. But we don’t know exactly how it performs. That data isn’t released by any official sources in the US — not by car seat manufacturers, not by government agencies like NHTSA, not anywhere! 

There are a few third-party websites that claim to offer objective crash test data for a variety of car seats. But we at Safe in the Seat don’t pay attention to that data for a few big reasons. First of all, third-party crash tests don’t actually give us meaningful data! Car seat manufacturers crash-test their products hundreds, even upwards of a thousand times. They crash test the finished product in every single installation configuration using every applicable-sized crash test dummy, not to mention a whole lot of testing at each stage of the development process too. So one or two crash tests completed by another organization just can’t give the same level of information! One or two crash tests aren’t going to represent the overall average performance of any car seat across its lifespan.

Affiliate links are included above. Safe in the Seat earns a small commission when you purchase through these links at no cost to you. We so appreciate your support.