The Money Mustache Community
Around the Internet => Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy => Topic started by: exterous on May 13, 2017, 07:41:56 PM
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Friends of our just had a baby and we noticed that they got a new SUV. When I said "Oh hey I see you have a new car" the response was "Yeah the car seat didn't really fit in our car so we decided to trade it in for an SUV." I just nodded like that made sense to me but the wheels were grinding away trying to make sense of that train of thought. I'll add a caveat that I don't have kids so I am not exactly familiar with car seats but I would assume they make car seats capable of fitting in a car the size of a Chrysler 200. I guess they must really love that car seat if the solution is to keep the car seat and not the car. I forgot to ask how it fit in his 6 month old truck lease.
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This may not be that outrageous. A rear facing car seat takes up a ton of room. I had to trade in my owned car for a larger (purchased with cash) vehicle because it didn't fit behind my seat at all (I'm tall) or my passenger would have had to sit ran rod straight with their mouth on the airbag.
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Shop for European car seats. They fit better in cars and are still safe.
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Car seats are extremely bulky and mandatory. I am convinced they are one of the reasons for the barrage of big crossovers out there.
A 6'3" friend could no longer physically drive his Toyota Matrix after a rear-facing child seat was installed. He had to sit in the passenger seat - knees under his chin - with his wife doing all the driving.
And a car like a Chrysler 200, with a swoopy rear roof line? My condolences to anyone that has a car like that and then has a baby.
Vehicle design is one area where short people have all the power, and they abuse it. Or do you think a sunroof or a swoopy roof line could have been invented by a tall person?
PS: I wanted to buy a VW Golf wagon as my last car. But neither of my kids could sit behind me. So I upsized to an Outback. Rear space problems are a real thing once one has kids.
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Car seats are extremely bulky and mandatory. I am convinced they are one of the reasons for the barrage of big crossovers out there.
A 6'3" friend could no longer physically drive his Toyota Matrix after a rear-facing child seat was installed. He had to sit in the passenger seat - knees under his chin - with his wife doing all the driving.
And a car like a Chrysler 200, with a swoopy rear roof line? My condolences to anyone that has a car like that and then has a baby.
Vehicle design is one area where short people have all the power, and they abuse it. Or do you think a sunroof or a swoopy roof line could have been invented by a tall person?
PS: I wanted to buy a VW Golf wagon as my last car. But neither of my kids could sit behind me. So I upsized to an Outback. Rear space problems are a real thing once one has kids.
Just wait until your kids are as tall as you are... ;)
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I don't know how big you guys are (I'm 1,82m, or about 6ft, lean), but we fitted a rear facing seat in a corolla and although I had to move the driver's seat to a less spacious position, it wasn't as bad as to consider selling the car. About one year later we switched to a front facing seat anyway.
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I had a car seat in a Mustang, so where there's a will, there's a way.
Admittedly, it was a front-facing seat. The rear facing ones are deeper. I still think I could have done it, but I would have had to exclusively date short women with perfect posture who could sit with the seat all the way forward and pretty much vertical.
We sold our Mustang because we simply could not fasten the base of our infant car seat into it securely. No matter how tight we got the strap, the base moved around too much to be safe. If it had worked, the front passenger seat would have been completely unusable because of how much room the car seat took up.
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Rear facing is the killer. Get through that and you're golden, but that's to minimum age 2 and authorities "suggest" longer than that. My kid is top of the growth chart so we turned her around by 2. We made do with two small sedans (Jetta, Acura) but it was tight and we aren't that tall (6' and 5'8".)
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God, I love being short sometimes! My almost 3 year-old is still rear facing in the back of my GTI with no problem for the front passengers. Part of it may be that I purposefully got the smallest convertible car seat out there. The seat my husband got for his Rav4 is MASSIVE and leaves less room for back passengers despite the fact that his car is bigger.
Maybe this makes up for all the things in life that tall people design (cabinets, counter heights, toilet seat heights, furniture, seats in airplanes, etc. etc. etc.? Pretty much the only chair I can sit down in comfortably and have my feet touch the floor are the ones for little kiddies in the elementary school classrooms. Sigh.
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Just wait until your kids are as tall as you are... ;)
I tried to justify a Pathfinder on that basis, but my (regular-sized) wife vetoed it. I'll just have to get the road trips in before age 15.
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Vehicle design is one area where short people have all the power, and they abuse it. Or do you think a sunroof or a swoopy roof line could have been invented by a tall person?
Hah, yes. I'm 6'5" (putting me in the ~99.9% percentile of height) with proportionately more of that height in my legs and many cars simply are not an option for me. Though I feel really bad for the folks that are even taller than I am. I can at least physically get into most cars even if it would be unsafe to drive or be extremely uncomfortable to be a passenger for any appreciable distance. I did, however drive a tiny car in high school which I actually modified (remounted the seat further back) in order to be able to drive. Good thing I never crashed it though, as doubtlessly the modification made the seat a death trap even if buckled in.
The world, in general, is not designed for tall people. It's the tyranny of those of modest stature!
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God, I love being short sometimes! My almost 3 year-old is still rear facing in the back of my GTI with no problem for the front passengers. Part of it may be that I purposefully got the smallest convertible car seat out there. The seat my husband got for his Rav4 is MASSIVE and leaves less room for back passengers despite the fact that his car is bigger.
Maybe this makes up for all the things in life that tall people design (cabinets, counter heights, toilet seat heights, furniture, seats in airplanes, etc. etc. etc.? Pretty much the only chair I can sit down in comfortably and have my feet touch the floor are the ones for little kiddies in the elementary school classrooms. Sigh.
But you fit in some really fun sports cars!
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My son's carseat fits just fine in my cargo bike.
Helluva lot cheaper than an SUV. And fun too.
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My husband is 6'4" and we've had some issues, as well. Now that we're past the rear-facing stage, we downsized to a Civic (and kept my Corolla the whole time). However, our not-quite-9 yr old is now wearing men size clothing and shoes, and will soon be taller than me. I fear our compact car days are numbered.
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I had my niece recently, and I couldn't get her car seat to fit in my car, so our day of adventuring was cancelled. Luckily, I have tons of Legos.
Today's car seats are waaay more complicated and bulky than when my younger siblings were kids (and, of course, they didn't even exist when I was a kid).
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Reader and lurker for many years and finally created an account.
For quite some time we had three car seats (two front facing, one rear-facing base / carrier for the baby) installed in the back of a 1995 BMW 5-series. It was always fun to watch other peoples' expressions as we parked and began to extract the family. When we bought the older kids' seats, we parked in the store's fire lane and carried out nearly every model to test for fit.
The black leather upholstery was super easy to keep clean, the enormous trunk held plenty of camping gear, and with a light touch on the pedals we averaged close to 30 mpg. Sadly, the arrival of kid #4 and maintenance on a twelve year old european car - even when using the local independent guy - proved too expensive. We donated it to the kidney people and took a nice deduction.
BTW we were the car's second owner, paying cash for 120k freeway miles and a folder of meticulous maintenance records. When the kidney people took it away, she'd just rolled over 210k.
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Not just the room, but also the anchors. The Honda cars seem to have anchor mounts that are easier to reach than almost any other car. I love my Camry, but I feel like a rube whenever I have to re-install a child seat in it.
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Vehicle design is one area where short people have all the power, and they abuse it. Or do you think a sunroof or a swoopy roof line could have been invented by a tall person?
Hah, yes. I'm 6'5" (putting me in the ~99.9% percentile of height) with proportionately more of that height in my legs and many cars simply are not an option for me. Though I feel really bad for the folks that are even taller than I am. I can at least physically get into most cars even if it would be unsafe to drive or be extremely uncomfortable to be a passenger for any appreciable distance. I did, however drive a tiny car in high school which I actually modified (remounted the seat further back) in order to be able to drive. Good thing I never crashed it though, as doubtlessly the modification made the seat a death trap even if buckled in.
The world, in general, is not designed for tall people. It's the tyranny of those of modest stature!
My college boyfriend was 6'8". He drove a Dodge Omni. On long car trips he would just put the seat back flat to drive.
When he got into the Navy and bought his "Ensign-mobile" - the other dudes were buying sports cars. He bought a minivan for the legroom.
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When he got into the Navy and bought his "Ensign-mobile" - the other dudes were buying sports cars. He bought a minivan for the legroom.
That's silly.
6'7" man here, and there are plenty of non-minivan cars to buy that are completely comfortable to sit in for long periods of time.
The honda civic was great. So is the nissan versa.
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I had an older watercooled VW whose seat would go so far back I couldn't quite bottom out the clutch. I'm 6'.
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Cars and planes suck, but there's a lot of evidence accumulating that the Labor Market for Tall men is white-hot. So don't whine about spending some of that extra money on a big car, tall people! (signed, an average-height author of a dissertation in labor economics)
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Car seats are extremely bulky and mandatory. I am convinced they are one of the reasons for the barrage of big crossovers out there.
A 6'3" friend could no longer physically drive his Toyota Matrix after a rear-facing child seat was installed. He had to sit in the passenger seat - knees under his chin - with his wife doing all the driving.
And a car like a Chrysler 200, with a swoopy rear roof line? My condolences to anyone that has a car like that and then has a baby.
They aren't abnormally tall (he's under 6') and the it gets pretty good car seat space ratings even for rear-facing
https://www.cars.com/articles/2016-chrysler-200-car-seat-check-1420690186379/
Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like some other option, like some of the ones suggested here (trying other seats, getting a european one) might have been a more financially sound idea than getting a new lease, especially since they got a new lease on a truck just a couple months before hand.
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The lease is the real problem. We had a 2001 civic and a 2009 fit when we had our daughter. The car seat fit but no one could ride in the front passenger seat. We sold the civic and paid cash for an outback to have one car with more room. The premise isn't ridiculous.
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There are a lot of dimensions here.
The transaction costs associated with changing cars are not large.
Leasing cars is probably not mustachian, because we shouldn't be driving enough for the lease to be priced correctly.
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Fitting a car seat in a Chrysler 200 is very easy. They have huge back seats.
I have three across in my C-Max Energi and it wasn't even very difficult. They're all rear-facing.
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If they're all rear-facing, did you have a multiple birth? Congratulations (either way)
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My kid just turned 3 and is still rear-facing. At her pediatrician appointment last week her doctor brought the subject up and his recommendation was to keep her rear facing "forever". Perhaps he exaggerates a bit, but the plan is still to keep her that way until I'm-not-sure-when.
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The infant "buckets" take up a lot of space. In the Subaru wagon that we used to have the passenger seat had to be all the way forward and very very upright in order to fit the "bucket" behind it. Ultimately we opted for a different car because it was so unworkable. The passenger seat didn't feel safe being 4" from the dashboard and super upright. I have no idea about the Chrysler that you mention - but it can be a problem. Some of the other rear facing seats are more upright (e.g. I think the Britax vs. the "bucket" style Graco). However, parents may not know this.
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If they're all rear-facing, did you have a multiple birth? Congratulations (either way)
Yep, and thank you! A three-year-old and two five-month-olds. All girls.
Everybody's going to rear-face as long as they can. They're in Clek Fllos, which come with an anti-rebound bar to keep everything more stable. Expensive, especially with the infant attachments, but they're skinny seats so they fit well, and I'm not going to cheap out on safety equipment (within reason) when we're maxing all our tax-advantaged accounts.