Is there a decent car that has 5 seats? I have an Audi A4 that needs replacing, there is no equivalent (Merc/BMW/Audi) that actually seats 3 in the back as they all have a central arm rest. I could get a LR Discovery or similar but that'd be so ridiculously expensive to run that I couldn't do it.

Surely the armrests fold up into the seatback. Or is the problem the little hump between the two bucket-like rear seats? Is your A4 different in that respect?

Depends on what you mean by decent. Every car I have ever owned or rented has 5 seats (okay, excluding track day hires)

If decent means can go over anything - Range Rover or Land Rover
Performance - Subaru or Mitsubishi do good cheap powerful cars (see my sig for my favourite)
Luxury - dunno, don't do luxury cars :-)

The armrests fold to form an uncomfortable hump, it's even worse in the much larger A6

What model year A4 do you have that doesn't have this problem?

Love the Disco 4, and my favourite go over anything vehicle (G Wagen) is available in RHD again, but fuel consumption is just absurd.



Never liked Mitsu's (apart from my L200) both the Forester and Outback have a hump in the middle as well as being hugely ugly, and not in the way that my G Wagen used to be. I'd possibly go for a Golf R20 if it wasn't so much money for a 4 cylinder hatchback (no idea what the back seats like).



I guess I'm looking at a "luxury" car, but preferably A4/3 series sized, wouldn't mind going up a size if it had 5 proper seats in the back.

Guess I could sell one of the kids...

I don't, see above.

Oh, sorry. I misinterpreted what you meant.

No probs, the wife has a VW Touran which has 5 proper seats but I get a nice company car every few years, it'd be much more useful if it could seat us all.

The Forester I have, and the Imprezas before that have no hump in the middle, however you are right about the ugly :-)

Back seats in a Golf are excellent for such a small car. If you are looking at R20 range you are in a better place with VW than Audi cost-wise.

I don't know of any 5 seat luxury cars in Audi A3 size though. I tend to think A6/A8 for executive class, at a much better price point than BMW/Merc etc

Would avoid all Lexuses (Lexi?) though - never driven one with any performance to speak of.

And they look passable



That's advances for you, uglier and less useful.

I had an A6 Allroad last year as a courtesy car, the hump was even worse than my A4 and the thing's the size of a supertanker. Ditto E-Class and 5 series. Can't stand Lexus/ii

I seem to recall my friend's 4-door Volvo (several years old) had a central seat position in the back rather than a hump. I'm not 100 percent certain about that.

My 2000 Honda Accord SE 4-door is not bad in this regard: The center spot in the back seat is quite livable, and what hump there is, is quite soft.

Hmm, that's 10 years ago. I'll take a look at the latest version.

These the last few cars I've owned or driven/ridden in regularly:

Toyota Highlander (my current car) - definitely seats five. Seats seven, actually. but I frequently have stuff in the back so the third row stays down unless necessary. The second row has a middle portion that's exchangeable. It starts with a full seat that folds down into an arm rest. When I don't want the seat and want to make it easy to climb in the third row, I take the middle seat out and stow it away under the center console in front, where a tray comes out and goes where the seat was. It's a little weird to explain.

Honda CRV - my wife's car. For a tiny SUV, it has plenty of nice features, and easily seats five. I'm a big fan of it, and it's a heck of a value.

Honda Odyssey - my last vehicle. Loved it. Again, that sat seven, and a full seven.

Now the less helpful...

Mitsubishi Eclipse - did that have a back seat?

I'm pretty sure if the Impreza WRX STi still had the pre-bubble mobile style, I would have gotten that when I was shopping for a new car earlier this year. I lusted after that car/style for years.

I gave my fully PPP'ed up Impreza to the wife, as after the 2001 model they became much uglier and with a worse power to weight ratio. Obviously the best was the P1 but they are getting rarer quite rapidly.

The core reason for the Litchfield Forester STi was because they didn't do an Impreza with decent enough performance.

View of all three of these cars here: http://moblog.net/view/884682/subarus-stationary - not that ugly really :-)

I quite like the Forester STi, but then I guess the mpgs are probably worse than a Discovery...

I'll take a look at Honda, we don't have the Odyssey here, or the Highlander

Yeah, thats the model that I absolutely loved. A few years ago they started putting pink STi stickers on the bubblemobiles. Ugh.

Latest Accord and CR-V both have a hump in the middle

I wouldn't call that much of a hump. It's not like the seats next to it, but I haven't seen any vehicle smaller than a minivan with three distinct seats in the back. I assumed we were talking about vehicles with reasonable rear-middle seats...

I wonder if there's a styling difference between European models, and North American models?

Is there a car model, regardless of age, that has appropriate back seats?

Citroen C6?
Volvo S80?

All cars I have ever owned have had 3 back seats. I have never driven a car with arm rests in the back, not sure if that would be on anything smaller than a minibus.

It might be that the European and US markets are very different here...dunno

It looks like there's an additional engine option on the European CRV, but I can't find any resource on the web to see what the interior looks like. It would be helpful to hear, tahir, what you define as a useful third rear seat...

The new 2.0 Diesel Forester doesn't look too bad and is reasonably powerful and very economical.

That new Subaru diesel engine is actually pretty good (for a diesel) and it has kept the boxer, low CoG setup the petrol engines have, so cornering is still tight.