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This is an actual conversation I had to have with my wife, having a third kid definitely requires a larger vehicle as the vast majority of cars today simply don
by irateswami 6y ago
This is an actual conversation I had to have with my wife, having a third kid definitely requires a larger vehicle as the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five. Child car seats are too wide and the backseats of most cars are too narrow, and the price jump to a vehicle that would be able to handle three child car seats at once is enormous. Throw in some dogs, a couple pieces of luggage that any nuclear family would have to tote around, plus a stroller and it becomes prohibitively tight.
It took me MONTHS of shopping and playing child-seat-jenga in various car dealership lots before I finally found a sedan that was actually able to hold everything (thank you, Volkswagen, for making an actual family sedan that could fit a family!).
- kube-system 6y agoWhen I was young, this was what minivans were for: families with three kids.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThrow in one kids best friend who is always around and maybe a grandparent who lives alone, going up to a 7 seater starts to get appealing pretty quickly.
- gowld 6y agoMinivans seat 7-8, which is 6 kids.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoWith today's car seats, it can be made to work but it's a challenge. Realistically 2 kids in car seats makes the middle seat of anything but the largest cars impractical. At which point you are going up an extra row of seats, 6 seat layouts are uncommon.
- kube-system 6y agoYou can't fill every back seat with a car seat. You will have issues accessing the rear if you put 3 in the middle row, the rear seat often isn't wide enough to accommodate three seats
- GauntletWizard 6y agoIn practice, Minivans seat 7 - Two adults, three of your own kids, and two of the neighbors.
- bigbubba 6y agoIf your kids have friends, you'll probably find yourself driving around as many kids as that fairly often. I was raised in a family of five and my parents had a minivan because nothing smaller would have been practical. Even if you can technically squeeze 3 kids into the back of a sedan, good luck going more than 30 minutes away without fights breaking out. And even if your kids are particularly well mannered, they still won't be comfortable. If you're driving a few hours to visit family, do you want to have a headache from fighting kids when you get there? Or kids in sour moods because their sibling wouldn't stop elbowing them?
- dljsjr 6y agoSure but when I was young it wasn't mandated for children to be in car seats until the age of 8 like TFA mentions. I was sitting in the back seat but I was definitely not in a car seat once I was around 4-5.
- bonoboTP 6y agoWhen I was young in the 90s, our car didn't even have seat belts for the back seats and child seats were unheard of.
- anonAndOn 6y agoMinivans are only un-cool until you are forced to appreciate their practicality. They can transport groups of kids and all their gear, a bunch of dogs, a surprising amount of furniture or even large sheets of lumber or drywall. I would only consider replacing my minivan with an electric minivan.
- organsnyder 6y agoNot full electric, but we've been loving our Pacifica PHEV. You do sacrifice a bit of practicality—no towing capability, and the middle seats don't fold into the floor like the gas version (the battery is down there)—but in the summer we sometimes go months without refueling. I fully concur on the practicality. The only vehicle more versatile than a minivan is full-size van (my family's conversion van growing up was insanely useful).
- nsxwolf 6y agoThanks for the heads up on the PHEV and the stow-and-go seats. That one would be a no-go for us because we it to haul stuff all the time. With the seats fully stowed it's practically as good as a pickup truck. Of course, you have to get all the toy cars and goldfish crackers off the floor first if you want the seats to actually stow.
- blhack 6y agoBETTER than a pickup in my opinion! You can lock the doors.
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoI called my parents minivan the indoor pickup truck, the seats spent more time stowed to haul stuff then not (after kids were grown)
- organsnyder 6y agoI've found the goldfish crackers readily crush themselves out of the way and the dust vacuums up fairly easily, especially if left to age for at least three months. Toy cars can definitely bugger up latches and hinges, though.
- DonHopkins 6y agoWhatever happened to station wagons, with all those extra flip-up seats in the back bay? This is the new Wagon Queen Family Truckster. This is a damn fine automobile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXN5sQ5g-U&ab_channel=FosterMediaLabs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXN5sQ5g-U&ab_channel=Foste...
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThey're called SUVs now and the extra seats are absent so that they can be styled with a sloping back. Priorities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snypher 6y agoI'd guess it has more to do with rear-impacy safety and crumple zones - the Tahoe is pretty square and could fit some small seats back there.
- 1-6 6y agoWhichever car designer decided to laminate simulated wood on the sides of the car needs to have their car taken away.
- DonHopkins 6y agoNow you can get color LCD panels that simulate simulated laminated wood on the sides of your car, including simulated wear and fading and scratches.
- 1-6 6y agoActually, they should reboot National Lampoon's vacation with an electric vehicle. That would be funny to watch.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
- aidenn0 6y agoWhen I was young you could fit 6 in a sedan and 8 in a station wagon. Bench seats in the front have gone away (I assume due to airbags). We didn't have a big family, but on car-pools, I was the smallest so I always got stuck straddling the stick shift for the cars that had the shifter on the floor.
- testfoobar 6y agoGlad you found a vehicle that worked for you. Minivans have locked this market segment up for years. Honda Odyssey & Toyota Sienna are the market leaders.
- war1025 6y agoWe ended up buying Diono Radian carseats [1], which are marketed as "the 3-across car seat" We can fit our three kids in the back of our Honda Civic perfectly well. But we've had exactly the same conversation. In order to have a fourth kid, we'd need to swap out our vehicles. House is fine, insurance is fine, income is fine, but we'd need to upgrade vehicles, and that seems to be just enough friction to make the idea unappealing. [1] https://www.diono.com/us/product/radian-3r-2020/ https://www.diono.com/us/product/radian-3r-2020/
- Someone1234 6y agoThe Radian is definitely king of three across. But they're premium priced ($200 each, or $600 for three), and sacrifice comfort particularly for longer trips. In general people who have never had kids don't seem to grasp that the average (non-Radian) car-seat is BIGGER than an adult side-to-side. The Radian series has a niche because they produced a car-seat the same size as an adult (with no loss of safety), but had to sacrifice comfort to do so.
- war1025 6y ago> sacrifice comfort particularly for longer trips. I guess maybe they are less comfortable than traditional car seats, but since car seats are basically build like lazy-boy recliners, that seems unsurprising. Our kids have never complained about the comfort or lack-thereof. They seem to have pretty equivalent comfort when compared to the back seat itself as far as I can tell.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoWhat makes you say they're less comfortable? Compared to my kid's carseat, it looks like they removed the side bolsters (which are like 6" tall in mine) but kept everything else basically the same - a few mm of foam and some neoprene over plastic.
- cbhl 6y agoThat definitely seems like an improvement over car seats from the 90s. As an adult I still remember hating full-day road trips in the hard-plastic-with-a-fabric-liner car seat my parents owned; my butt was always sore after sitting in it for too long.
- jxramos 6y agoThere's an individual on YouTube who does a great job reviewing carseat fits into various vehicles. The example below he fits 3 car seats in the back of a Ford Focus, which most people wouldn't consider to be a large car. Alex on Autos https://youtu.be/RTh06yWql_s?t=223 https://youtu.be/RTh06yWql_s?t=223 It can be done. There's also a great product called the MultiMac sold in the UK and I think the EU. Fits 4 in the back seat, worth checking out if available in your locale. It won't ship to the US for regulatory reasons. https://youtu.be/zybM8cltCxU?t=179 https://youtu.be/zybM8cltCxU?t=179
- cameldrv 6y agoYou can do it in almost any car. You just need narrower car seats. Cosco has several that are narrower.
- Someone1234 6y agoI own a Cosco from Walmart (for travel), and while they're the smallest and lightest legal seats on the market the build and safety is inferior. There's a reason we own it, and don't use it day-to-day. It is a fine occasional "grandparent seat" or for travel, but if it is your daily driver and need three across, the Radian is a safer & much better built alternative.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- grillvogel 6y agojust get a minivan
- mikepurvis 6y agoWhen my partner and I had our third, the Mazda 5 was our compromise vehicle— still has sliding doors and the overall aesthetics of a minivan, but drives like a car, gets decent gas mileage, and has a footprint comparable to a CUV for the purposes of parking and so-on. We may well go to a full size van at some point, but once the kids are no longer babies, they actually travel somewhat lighter— no stroller, playpen, diaper bag, etc being shlepped everywhere.
- spankalee 6y agoThe Ford Transit Connect is an awesome, just slightly larger version of that if you want to be a bit smaller than a full-sized van or a Metris.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoNow if only they sold it with air suspension (or back breaking stiff coils) so it could also replace pickups...
- aidenn0 6y agoI would have bought a Mazda 5 if they still sold them. However, I don't live in a great place for buying used.
- mhh__ 6y agoIsn't the XC90 basically the textbook school run car?
- brewdad 6y agoFor people in a certain economic class, yes. For those where it's out of reach financially, there's the Odyssey and the Sienna.
- vondur 6y agoI guess that's why Minivans are popular here in the US. I have a Mazda 5, which is like a mini-minivan and it's probably big enough for 3 car seats. I really like this car, too bad Mazda gave up on them here in the US.
- 1-6 6y agoLet's not forget the expiration dates on Car Safety Seats. C'mon, really? Seats with Styrofoam may deteriorate eventually but I haven't heard of a casualties due to expired car seats.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoThis is part of the plan to force people to buy new. They make it illegal to sell any kids stuff older than a year or two.
- flubert 6y agoAll the car seats for my kids were chiefly composed of plastics. I'm sure there is quite a high factor of safety for car seat design, but there are quite a few time and temperature related failure modes for plastics (i.e. getting brittle over time as the plasticizers outgas, UV exposure, etc.). https://www.sintef.no/globalassets/project/ffs/dokumenter/seminar-juni2010/rapra-ffs-2010.pdf/ https://www.sintef.no/globalassets/project/ffs/dokumenter/se... https://www.amazon.com/Plastics-Failure-Guide-2E-Prevention/dp/1569904499 https://www.amazon.com/Plastics-Failure-Guide-2E-Prevention/...
- bigmattystyles 6y agoTo be fair, how do you test this - as a system - effectively. The consequences of failure on a child seat are not like, say, a stand mixer. That being said, I suspect it has more to do with the manufacturer attempting to limit their liability window. It's wasteful right, but in a litigious world, I get it.
- lastofus 6y agoStart crash testing expired seats and compare results to new ones of the same make/model. They expire relatively quickly, so they would not be difficult to find. For example, our Graco Keyfit 30 expires after 6 years.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoI think you’d have to mandate it legislatively though. There are no incentives for seat manufacturers to do this of their own volition. The quick expiration works in their favor on every front...
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago> the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five I recently visited Pakistan for the first time, and was amazed to see a family of five riding around on a small Honda motorbike. The father was driving, a small child sat in front of the father, the was mother hanging on behind the father, and the oldest daughter sitting on the far back with both legs hanging off to the left while holding an infant. None of them were wearing helmets. It was both terrifying & impressive.
- eCa 6y agoI was in Ukraine in the mid-00s. Saw a five person motorcycle. No helmets, but they had an open side-car so a bit more space. Youngest kid was in a bucket held by big sister.
- j1elo 6y agoAdd to that a wooden box with a small metal bars through which I could glance a couple of chickens that were being transported by the family, in Vietnam. Amazing. The rate of children deaths or severe injuries caused by motorbike accidents must have been over the roof in these countries.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y agoMust have been? Large parts of Southeast Asia still get around with the whole family on one motorbike today. Not so much in the large cities but once you get outside them, absolutely.
- bobthepanda 6y agoThe road deaths are also very large in those countries (though a fair amount of that is also people going high speeds on roads that would not be rated for that speed in a developed country)
- safetyengineer 6y agoHelmets work but after working in automotive safety, motorcycles are death traps. I can't emphasize this enough. They are no automobile, and are not comparable.
- christophilus 6y agoI agree, but I also have friends who fit three car seats into a Honda. It’s super tight, but it can be done.
- prawn 6y agoEven if you find a seat configuration that fits, the next hassle that drove me nuts was getting access to seatbelts easily. Taking the kids anywhere is that much more annoying when you can't rely on the oldest at least sorting out their own buckles. (Only just occurred to me that a seatbelt extender would probably help bring the receiving part of the latch up from the depths between the seats -- too late now, bought a different car.) Almost worth staggering births so that after three years the eldest is able to handle buckling themselves and then siblings. Worth finding every advantage like this when you're outnumbered by children.
- jo6gwb 6y agoYour comment leads me to wonder if car safety laws also contribute to this. Back in the day cars were large and you could fit four kids in the back of a station wagon. In sedans, there was a platform behind the seats in the rear that kids could stretch out on (no seatbelt of course).
- marcandre 6y agoThe cost of raising a child is roughly 10-15k a year. How much is the car upgrade (on a per year basis)?
- lsllc 6y agoAlright, don't leave me hanging -- which Volkswagen?
- cialowicz 6y agoMy guess would be the Passat.
- lsllc 6y agoMy family had a VW Passat in the late 80's, lots of fond memories. I'll even give a pass to the neighborhood kids who stole the VW badge (yay Beastie Boys!) ....... You know you're out there ... you might now be the CFO for a mid-size logistics company specializing in a modern, flexible forward-thinking unrivaled logistics service but back then my dad was NOT happy that morning when he discovered the badge was missing.
- m_eiman 6y agoThe Sharan fits seven persons (possibly seven adults, but the two back seats could be a bit tight for some), and is wide enough in the middle row for three kids in kids' seats. It still looks and handles like a normal car rather than a bus.
- namdnay 6y agoEither the Sharan or a Caravelle? The Caravelle seems to be a favourite with big families in Europe edit: but neither are sedans
- sfa_aok 6y agoThis is an even bigger problem to solve when you factor in that: - Different countries have different standards, so car seats vary accordingly - Models change over the years So finding out if you can get three car seats into a car is a massive headache.
- lxmorj 6y agoSeems like a good opp. Make a bench seat attachment that fits into most cars, with interchangeable carseats for different aged kids. Could have a 3-wide and a 4-wide model for different sized cars.
- agensaequivocum 6y agoI've been thinking about whether, when we have our fourth, to get a minivan, or just jump straight to a 15 passenger van. I know I'll need one eventually.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoWe got the 7 seater transit after we were pregnant with our fourth, then exchanged it for the sub 7ft height 15 seater after we had 5.
- jgalt212 6y ago> the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five Yes, but only if you count by unique line items. If you count by market share, the large family market is well served. “S.U.V.s made up 47.4 percent of U.S. sales in 2019 with sedans at 22.1 percent,” said Tom Libby, automotive analyst at IHS Markit. “By 2025, we see the light-truck segment that includes S.U.V.s, vans and pickups to make up 78 percent of sales compared to 72 percent now.”[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/suv-sales-best-sellers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/suv-sales-best-s...
- ynniv 6y agoI replaced my 3-series BMW with a Honda Odyssey, and I've spent two years singing its praises. Part of the problem is that we have created a culture that uses cars as a form of self expression, and many early parents aren't ready to "be" a minivan. But the minivan is what you actually want as a parent: room for six people of any size, or four people and at least twice as much cargo as an SUV, with safe, remote control doors that can be operated by kids. It's a living room on wheels, including the TV. Honda is trying to bridge the identify gap a little with paddle shifting, ventilated seats, and almost 300hp, but really we should try to step back from seeing the car as an expression of who we are, and try to optimize for the functionality that we use every day. As much fun as it was to drive the BMW, finding a way to fit my growing family into it was a stressful mess and I'm happy to have found, perhaps unintentionally, a much better situation. Some of this insight came to me from Steve Kaufer of TripAdvisor, who at the time I was there was running a $4B company and driving an old minivan, because that's what his family fit in. He never cared for a fancy new car because fancy meant small and he wasn't out to impress anyone on the road anyway. But I also can't pretend that Honda's naturally aspirated 6-cylinder and perfectly matched 10-speed (domestic!) paddle shifter didn't help seal the deal in my garage.
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoIm all about the minivan, and completely agree with everything you're saying here. Ive been getting my wife prepped for one when the time comes, and i think shes come around to see how much they just make sense. Also doesnt hurt that a few friends actually expressed their regret going suv over the van.
- tomcam 6y agoYour instincts are good. I have a top-of-the-line SUV that cost three times what my top-of-the-line minivan did, and the minivan smokes it in most ways (driving performance excepted). If I had to choose between the two I would take the minivan any day of the week, though I’d miss the extra hundred horsepower going up the hill to my house.
- zetazzed 6y ago
- lagerstedt 6y agoWhy on earth would you buy a sedan if you need to haul stuff/dogs around?