DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour    

It doesn’t make any difference if a car is a sedan, crossover, coupe or convertible; if the seating capacity is listed as “5” then deduct 3. If it’s listed as “6” you can deduct 4. And if it’s shown as “4” you can legitimately deduct 2. “This has angered me for some time. You may ask, “Why, Mr. Al, does this anger you so? Let me tell you why it angers me so.

When people my age were young and the earth had sufficiently cooled to allow civilization to walk upright, cars were roomy enough to hold a prom in them. Lord knows enough fireworks shows went on in them throughout the decades. Take a 1949 Hudson, for instance. There was enough passenger room to house a small town with its own mayor, post office and zip code. It didn’t take a Cray Super Computer to make one think the vehicle was designed by claustrophobics. A ’51 Packard could have served as a maintenance hangar for a B-36.

Rear seat of 1951 Packard
would be a good place
to stretch out for a nap

As the years went on and gasoline became more expensive and less-readily available people became more aware of the ratio between vehicle weight and fuel use. So cars that were once used as templates for designing football fields were scrunched into smaller, lighter vehicles.

This is fine but it doesn’t take a visiting professor from the world-famous Sam Houston Institute of Technology to realize that a smaller vehicle contains less interior room. Where once you could “Allemande left and Do-Sa-Do” in the backseat of a Buick you’re now lucky to avoid knocking your teeth out with your own knees.

Let’s start out with a coupe and convertible. At best you’re going to have plenty of room for driver and passenger and you’ll generally be able to put two more passengers in the rear seat, although it will be hell getting back there, and worse yet, sometimes three. But just what kind of environment will these backseat passengers have? First of all they’d have to be — at best — kids.

Kids don’t take up much room and they don’t complain much about being cramped into tight areas. In that aspect they’re a lot like cats. But the older these children become the more they’ll realize they’re being crammed into a steel cell that rolls along on four Michelin tires. Eventually the rear seat becomes an easily-accessible storage area rather than a passenger compartment. As I may cruelly have stated on too-many occasions, even Lt. Dan wouldn’t be comfortable in the rear seat of a modern-day coupe or convertible.

Are sedans any more comfortable? Sure, if you have a Maybach or Jaguar XJL. But then there’s a different set of problems. Rear wheel-drive cars have a driveshaft that connects the transmission to the rear-end assembly. The driveshaft needs some place to live so there’s a built-in tunnel that rises up throughout the passenger cabin that houses the big iron tube. But what’s this?!!! The poor bastard sitting in the middle of the rear seat has to either put both his legs on one side or the other of the tunnel or put a leg on either side of it. The alternative is the aforementioned “eating his own knees.”

This morning I was in a Lincoln Town Car, being driven to the airport. There was the driver and a person in the front seat and myself and a colleague in the back seat. However, the foot area is huge and the platform is flat.

Different story if a third party had been back there with the two of us. I don’t know if there’s a solution to any of this but if this were a perfect world the one I propose would be adopted. I say that just as there’s a warning label stamped on the side of cigarette packs advising the user of the possibility of this product causing cancer, so, too, should there be a warning on vehicles saying something like “Repeated exposure to being shoe-horned into the rear seat of vehicles can result in the passenger becoming hopelessly crippled and unable to engage in future Olympic gymnastics.”

What the car-buying public should realize is that they don’t need to buy a Miata, Nissan Z or a Porsche 911 to own a two-seat vehicle — they’re all two-seat vehicles. Additional passengers sit at their own risk.