One issue with three-row vehicles is that the third row is hard to get into. If that row is rear-facing, like in a traditional station wagon, you get in through the rear door. If it is front facing, you either remove one of the seats from the middle row, or have a way to slide or fold them out of the way. This is awkward for the same reason that the rear seats in a two door car are awkward, and there we fix it by adding a second row of doors. Why don't we see six door cars?
Car manufacturers have made some:
Mercedes-Benz w124
six-door, source
Checker Aerobus, also
produced with eight doors
You also see aftermarket conversions:
Naively, a seatbelt extender seems exactly the right tool: Since the problem comes from the booster moving the child up without moving the buckle up, an appropriately sized extender that moved the buckle up to match seems ideal. So what is the problem?
We started with my parts: keyboard and drums. These are electronic instruments, so I recorded their output directly into Audacity and ignored the camera's audio. I normally play both simultaneously, but here I did the drums first. That meant I only needed one camera, and could focus on each part as I played it. The drum part was the fourth of four takes, keyboard first of three.
I aligned the two tracks manually, made an initial mix, and sent it to Cecilia. She sent back her main fiddle part, and an additional fiddle part for the second half. She also recorded audio separately, for higher quality, and made sure to align it with what I had sent her.
Now that I had all the parts, I mixed the video's audio track. I used Audacity, since I only wanted to work with volume. We hadn't planned any arrangement ahead of time, so we added a some that was not originally there: the fiddle part comes in at the first A2 instead of the beginning, the drums sit out the A1 of the third time through, etc:
The cheapest new (2021) car you can get in the US right now, as far as I can tell, is the 4-seater Chevy Spark, $13,400 MSRP in its cheapest configuration. The cheapest 5-seater is the Mitsubishi Mirage, at $14,295. The cheapest 7-seater is the VW Tiguan, at $25,245.
(What about 6-seaters? Sedans seating three in the front and three in the back used to be common, but the last one in the US was the 2013 Chevy Impala.)
Why do you pay $11k (+77%) to seat more than five? Sure, most people don't need a car that big, but there are still a lot of price-sensitive families.
My parents always had two cars; given where we lived, where their jobs were, and the kind of jobs they had, there wasn't anything else that would've made sense. I was never very excited about driving: I put off getting my learners permit for over a year, until eventually my aunt learned that I still didn't have one and told me she was taking me to the RMV and wasn't going to take no for an answer. I learned to drive, but once I got my license I was back to not driving: putting me on the family car insurance as a teenage boy would've cost thousands of dollars a year, and I could mostly take public transit places.
As an adult, I've been able to live in places with good public transportation, close enough to bike/scoot to work, or both. Even as we got more settled and had two kids, not having a car hasn't been a problem.
With a third kid, though, we're thinking we probably will get a car. Various reasons:
Band | Free Raisins | |
Band | Kingfisher | |
Code | Bass Whistle | |
Code | Apartment Price Map | |
Dance | BIDA Contra | |
Child | Lily | |
Child | Anna |