We were reminiscing the other night about our cars from years ago. Myself & the future Mrs L both loved our Spitfires, mine in BRG , hers in bright yellow. I still have the brochure.
When her first born arrived, she had no problems accommodating baby et al in the Spit. However, when daughter no 2 arrived on the scene, something larger was needed, so it was replaced by a BGT. Eldest daughter in a baby seat up front, newborn in a travel cot on the rear shelf. And when they travelled en famille, both youngsters were in the back.
She cannot understand all todays fuss about needing a 'large' car just because you have two young 'uns to transport around. Visiting her parents was a 380 mile round trip and never posed a problem for her in the much loved BGT. Shame it wasn't the V8 version though!
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One of my neighbours has a Porsche 993. When his daughter was younger the car permanently had a child seat in the back, which looked cool in a left field sort of way. Apparently she preferred much the Porsche to Mummy's X3.
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I know a family who to this day, all 4 of them ride around in a 1979 Mini 1000, in brown, welded to high heaven, huge roofrack. They chuck all their bags on the roofrack, pile in and go on family holidays in it. Its not a classic really, its just the car their parents had when they were young and they never changed it.
Brings a smile.
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I like to think I would be like that with my Panda, a grand farther and still driving same car as I have now when its 40 years old. Sadly I doubt that will happen for many reasons!
I've always loved the idea of buying a brand new car and keeping it for ever though.
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With more and more people seeing cars as “white goods” these days its more common place for people to “throw it away and getting a new one” - Or "upgrade" when they see fit
A friend of mine did that, had two children and “needed" a BMW X5!!! so went out and got one.
Last winter it was sat on the drive for the month of snow unusable, because it wouldn’t go anywhere – pointless.
Its up for sale now.
I like to keep a car for as long as I possibly can – With the exception of when I got rid of my Astra – because I wanted the Vectra I’ve got.. with the man maths of, its worth it because its cheaper to tax - and the Astra hurts my back
I hope I can keep the Vectra for as long as possible IE until its no longer economical to run.
Which is why I spend a whole Sunday lovingly shampooing the inside and outside and admiring how good it looks afterwards
Our next door neighbour who defintley sees cars as “white goods” said to me once while I was washing the Vectra “I can’t be bothered with that I just take it through the car wash”
Says it all really
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This whole thing about needing bigger cars is (to a large degree) down to the requirement to fit kids car seats. They're big things, especially for little ones, and with more than one kid, you soon find even the larger cars jammed full to the brim with them. And that's before you've started filling it with change bags, push chairs etc.
Plus, the push chairs are often huge great things too.
I'm not keen on the silly push chairs (a regular stroller with a decent storage bag underneath is fine for my needs), but I'm all for better child seats in cars. We might look fondly to the past when you could squeeze 5 or 6 kids across the back of a Cortina, but frankly I'd rather my own kids be belted up safely in appropriate seats.
I'm sure some folk still (perhaps secretly) think fondly back to the days when one could knock back a few beers and drive home from the pub. We all move on though, and for the better I think.
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>> Plus, the push chairs are often huge great things too.
+1
A bigger car is required not for the baby, but to carry equipments for the baby!
The pushchair itself eats up my car's whole boot!
A group 1 or above car seat will make anyone sitting just beside the baby will have his/her elbow stuck under the baby seat.
Then add baby's changing bag, milk bottles, some toys etc. You can fit a baby seat on 3-dr car but that's too cumbersome and difficult unless you are comfortable with acrobatics.
So yes, baby means bigger car (or at least a medium size 4/5-dr family car).
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It's gone a bit silly now, have a child must have an MPV.
I was good safety concious dad though in the bad old days when truck drivers used to take their kids out with them before elfinsafety stopped it.
I'd strap and tie my little lad's car safety seat securely to the passenger seat in the Daf2800, and fed him properly at meal times, he'd spend much of the trip fast asleep.
He was around 2 or 3 at the time....i'd get him to hide on the bed behind the curtain at one particular place, little blighter used to peer round the curtain like a tiny Eric Morecombe and i'd be shooing him back.
Ditto he'd come out in the rolonoff skip truck too in later years, and the bulldozer drivers use to let him drive the machine whilst sitting on their lap when he was about 7 or so.
Happy innocent days, I'd probably get locked up now, but in mitigation he's a strapper, happy as Larry and drives a car transporter (not as well as his dad of course..:-))
Kids get a bit too molly coddled these days, probably bored to tears too.
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My Grandad used to take me out in his work van (was a carpenter) and let me sit in the back, sliding around with all his saws and chisels. I can't say it's made me any happier that he did that, but I was certainly lucky not to be injured! :)
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Plenty of things are possible, LL; that doesn't mean we should do them just because we can. You don't say how the carry cot and baby seat were secured in the MG but it's hard to imagine you could do it to modern standards. A modern Group 0 baby seat (or I should probably say an early-2000s baby seat, which is when we were at that stage of parenting) requires as much space behind the front seat as a six-foot adult; we had a Saab 9-3 at the time and the seat wouldn't fit behind me.
It would probably be unfair to question the crash safety of the MG because I don't suppose it was much worse than anything else of that period.
On the other hand I quite agree that a medium-sized car with four doors ought to be enough for a family of four. We did our share of laughing and pointing at the friends who ordered an Espace the moment they announced they were expecting number two, but MPVs, especially the smaller car-like ones, answer a need that no-one had even identified 30 years ago, when it was still considered acceptable for four under-fives to slide about on the vinyl back seat of an estate car.
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when it was still considered acceptable for four under-fives to
>> slide about on the vinyl back seat of an estate car.
>>
According to my parents many moons ago I used to be placed in a carry cot on the back seats of a small Fiat that wasn't fittted with seat belts in the rear, but that was normal for the time then.
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>> According to my parents many moons ago I used to be placed in a carry
>> cot on the back seats of a small Fiat that wasn't fittted with seat belts
>> in the rear, but that was normal for the time then.
>>
Today you would be strapped securely on top of a 10 to 15 gallon plastic tank of flammable liquid in the back (unless its a Honda Civic where mummy and daddy - or daddy and daddy or mummy and mummy - get to sit on the bomb).
Progress is great isn't it.
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gmac>> Today you would be strapped securely on top of a 10 to 15 gallon plastic
>> tank of flammable liquid in the back (unless its a Honda Civic where mummy and
>> daddy - or daddy and daddy or mummy and mummy - get to sit on
>> the bomb).
>>
>> Progress is great isn't it.
>>
What did cars of those days run on then? Air?
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>> What did cars of those days run on then? Air?
>>
Petrol in a tank under the boot floor, not me strapped in with a seat belt and harness sat on top of the tank.
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Should try a seat rather than the tank much comfortable ;-)
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i remember as a small child when my mum had the second set of twins ( i was one of the first pair) including the singles sibblings and both parents we numbered 8, my old man bought a vauxhall victor estate ( i think) so we could all fit in for the holiday to yarmouth..oh my mate from across the road made up the complement...happy days
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It is faaaaar safer to have the petrol tank beneath the passengers than under the boot floor.
Any impact severe enough to compromise the tank beneath the passenger compartment has already spared you the worry of burning to death.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_tank_controversy
"An example of a Pinto rear-end accident that led to a lawsuit was the 1972 accident that killed Lilly Gray and severely burned 13-year old Richard Grimshaw.
The accident resulted in the court case Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co., in which the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million and punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford, partially because Ford had been aware of the design defects before production but had decided against changing the design."
Edit: I'm less sure of the old Wartburg (or was is the Tabant) that avoided the need for a fuel pump by having the petrol tank sited above the engine...
Last edited by: Lygonos on Tue 20 Sep 11 at 20:06
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Baby on board. Better get a bigger car. - Bagpuss
