Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Supersized cars?

DH and I laugh all the time about our cars. Sigh one of my doors on my corolla is broken, luckily it's the back door behind the driver. While the front bumper of his car was smashed in. And my rear bumper was scraped by someone else. I feel good about our cars because we're super unlucky with them for some reason. During our time out on the East Coast, in 2 years we've had 3 hit and run accidents where you can see quite a lot of damage on our cars, but NO note. My rear bumper, DH's front bumper, and his rear bumper. I just don't get how people can hit someone else's car in a parking lot and LEAVE! I couldn't just leave, I would never be able to sleep again without nightmares. I would probably be comatose from the anxiety that the cops were coming, bad karma, etc.

But we were debating again, do you really need a large car for kids? When we first meet DH thought we'd never need anything larger than his focus. He did admit with 2 kids it "might" be better to have 4 doors, but he didn't think anything bigger than a compact necessary. Both of us were raised in tiny cars, VW rabbit and bug. But I argue it's because we didn't have car seats but bassinets our moms put in the front seat floor. Yeah nuts, but back then people appparently didn't put much stock into car seats.

So I'm wondering do people really need large SUVs or minivans? I can understand a sedan because well our cars are tight, but anything larger?

I argue it's necessary depending on age of kids and carseats. DH says no way can you ever have kids fast enough to not fit 3 car seats in a sedan. I don't know if that's true, except if you happened to have like twins or triplets.

I wonder are we supersizing our cars because we're buying to the larger space issues? Or is it necessary. FWIW, I would love a larger car, but my DH is a no-go person. So it's not happening.

But I posted on two different message boards WIR and Savingsadvice threads and the opinions were very differing and interesting. I haven't settled on whether we'll jump directly into a minivan or try a midsized sedan.

7 comments:

L. Marie Joseph said...

Big cars/SUVs are for large familes. I know a couple that has 5 children all under 6 years old. They must have a van, no excuses!

It's funny to me when I see and single guy/girl that is driving a monster car w/ no children LOL

MS said...

We're in the same boat. Our 5-person (with two in car seats) family has already outgrown my Civic for all but the shortest trips. My wife is also getting to the point where her back seat is at capacity.

We've decided that we're going to bite the bullet and look for a minivan as the next car, as the kids are only going to get bigger.

Living Almost Large said...

Large familes? Or also people with a lot of kids at once? Friends of ours endedup with a minivan because they had a lot of kids fast. Turns out a double stroller and stuff like that ended up being bigger than expected. Had no idea things like that affected things.

Anonymous said...

We were one of those families that ended up with 3 kids under 2 year old due to having a surprise pregnacy with twins! ;) All of the
stuff that needed to be taken with those young kids on every trip made it neccesary to have a larger vehicle. As the kids got older we needed a mini van to take them, their musical instruments, their friends, etc. everywhere. Now that the kids are older and have their own vehicles we are downsizing to a Blazer so that we can still haul the things we need to (due to my job) and the kids can use it when they need to haul bigger things also.

Living Almost Large said...

I guess that's what happens the unplanned. It could be worse. But thus the choice is move up all at once and bite the bullet or go increments?

Anonymous said...

We had a mid-sized SUV prior to our kid because of our two large dogs. It was impossible to fit them in a sedan. Now that we've got a kid, I'm glad for the SUV. The child safety seats are HUGE and I have a hard time fitting it into our compact car - so I use the SUV all the time. Strollers and things like that would eat up an awful lot of trunk space too. We can have two kids and car seats in the mid-sized SUV, but we'd need a minivan if we had three kids in car seats. No way would three large car seats fit in the back seat of our SUV.

Anonymous said...

We have 7 children, 5 of them are in car seats/boosters because in our state you have to have them in seats until 8 yrs. or 80 lbs.
We had no option but to go with a 15 passenger van with back seat out for storage, so it seats 11 and we have room to transport things/dogs.
Not my favorite vehicle, but the only one that would work!