The Buick Envision is a new (in the US, at least) luxury crossover sold by the Buick division of General Motors. It competes with foreign and domestic 5-passenger luxury SUVs like the Lincoln MKX, Lincoln MKC, Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class, Mercedes-Benz M-Class, Volvo XC60, BMW X3, Acura RDX, Lexus RX, Lexus NX, and Audi Q5 among families who don’t need a full time 3rd row but who are looking for safety, style, and high-end transportation.

When it comes to safety, the Envision delivers. It’s a Top Safety Pick+ by the IIHS for 2017, featuring good small overlap, moderate overlap, side, roof, head restraint, and frontal crash prevention scores, showing GM clearly did their homework when designing it.

Given its safe, sturdy, and stylish design, I became curious about which car seats would fit well across the back seat of the Envision. The good news was that you can definitely make 3 across work with several different seats; the bad news is that many of those seats cost a decent amount of money, since the back row is on the narrower end. So which seats worked and which seats didn’t? We’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s take a look at some best practice in car seat selection, orientation, and installation.

The safest configuration we know of when it comes to vehicle safety is rear-facing. I recommend rear-facing your children long past age 1, which is the legal requirement in most states, and going well into the preschool years (ideally until 4!), before forward-facing them in harnessed convertible or combination seats (ideally until 6, 7, or 8!). Once they outgrow their harnessed seats, it’s best to keep them restrained in high-back boosters until they’re physically and psychologically ready to use adult seat belt systems (which typically happens between 10 and 12). We want our little ones in the safest positions we know of for as long as possible to give them the greatest advantages in a collision.

Keeping these ideas in mind, I set to work to find which infant, convertible, combination, and booster seats would work best in 3 across combinations in the Envision. It’s my goal to make this list the most thorough on the Internet. If you find the list helpful when shopping for car seats, you can shop through my Amazon link below. I’ll add more seats as I test them over time.