Claire and I both have our own cars, and Jack’s seat has been fitted to Claire’s car, a 2002 Volkswagen Golf, as hers happens to have Iso-Fix fittings behind the rear seats ready for fitting child-seats to.
Iso-Fix fittings are basically u-shape fittings hidden on the metal-work behind the rear seats, where the seat belts emerge from. Iso-Fix car seats are car seats which have special locking hooks that clamp onto these u-shape fittings. Once clamped on, the car seat is held fast to the car, meaning that if there was an accident, the car seat shouldn’t move away from the seat. My 2004 Ford Focus doesn’t happen to have these, but I have heard that all cars as of 2007 should be fitted with Iso-Fix fittings, but don’t quote me on that!
The Quinny Travel System (the pram/buggy we have) that we have fits snuggly in the boot of Claire’s Golf, with little room to spare. This means that if you take Jack shopping at Tesco, then the only space in the car for the shopping is on the rear seat, where Jack isn’t sitting of course!
Anyway, Claire has decided that the car is too small and that we needed a bigger one and so went out for a day’s worth of car-gazing. We looked at different types of cars:
- Kia Sedona
- Ford C-Max
- Ford S-Max
- Vauxhall Zafira
- Vauxhall Meriva
- And even looked at a Mercedes B150 although the prices of those are a tad higher than we had budgeted.
We did question whether or not we actually needed a massive A-Team van to move the family around with, and whether we could do with a bigger car, or even an estate. We looked at several estate cars on our journeys, but none that we liked particularly. During this period of pondering, we stumbled upon the Volkswagen garage in Peterborough where we found a VW Golf Plus, which is basically a Golf but with more head-room, etc. (Ford does this with the Focus, making the C-Max and with the Mondeo, making the S-Max.) The Golf Plus was in the newer shape Golf to ours, which is good too.
After the salesman started working his magic on selling us the car, we put the seemingly hugh bootspace in the Golf Plus to test and tried to flat-pack the Quinny buggy into the back... but it didn’t fit! The salesman tried to move the seats in the back of the car around to make the buggy fit, but the truth was that the newer shape Golf Plus actually has a smaller boot than the Golf that we had!! This is a shame, as for a few years Claire had mentioned that when we had kids, she’d like a Golf Plus, as she really likes the one that she has, and that it looked quite cool and funky too. (Probably the colour more than anything, but either way, she liked it.)
Just as we were about to leave, we were talked into looking at a VW Touran, which looks like a small, fun-packed mini MPV-type thing. It looked good inside, felt comfortable to drive, but didn’t feel as big and intimidating as the S-Max did. We had to leave sharpish, as Jack needed to get back home for more booby-juice, but came away thinking that the Touran was certainly an interesting choice...
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