There’s a lot more different on the 2020 gls450 than just the body. Entertainment system is all new, I think suspension changed, can’t remember the rest
Get a minivan. My wife kept saying no, but especially if you have 3 car seats makes things much easier. To me a q7 or xc90 is not much cooler than a Toyota Siena.
Yes the 3rd row eats up a ton of space. That’s why your choice may end up being the Escalade / something similarly sized (Suburban, Expedition, etc) or a minivan.
I am not in the position to worry/care about car seats, but everyone I know who has them swears by side-slide doors. If not a Model X then consider a Pacifica/Sienna/Odyssey just for 2-3 years while you’re dealing with them.
I have lost count of my friends who were having kids, bought/leased an SUV, and within a year were rolling negative equity into a minivan.
most of those cars you listed have captains chairs in the 2nd row or are commonly optioned with them, I don’t have kids but through common sense I would think putting a carseat in the 3rd row would be very annoying when removing and buckling in said kid. just my 2 cents
Yeah putting that third kid in the back is a pita, that kid needs to be the oldest so they can help out or you open the back and put them in that way. Not many vehicles will accommodate three across, maybe a full size like a yukon/tahoe.
Then I googled to try and find what I was looking for and found The Car Seat Lady and fell down a rabbit hole I can’t unsee. People commenting their vehicles and seat brands and their childs measurement and I’m not a pediatrician and I feel like I just tripped and fell in a HIPAA violation and it’s too early to start drinking.
I still have my actual note to self, which says, “do not have kids”. I leave that to everyone else (goes without saying that trying is fun though).
I have definitely put a few car seats in/out of cars before so I have great empathy for OP. This seems like one of many problems raising kids that many people have but “goes away” after a few years and nobody solves (or solves well) - struggling is the right of passage. When I originally replied I thought I had seen a solution before (a guy I was previously in a mastermind group with for over a year runs a site for dads of triplets), but memory wrong/cache miss.
That Carseat Lady site seems like a wealth of knowledge on which seats fit where, and as Joe said:
If they are staggered in age you can put some of them to work. And nobody wants to drive their kids around in one of those hotel shuttles (I had trouble getting out of one this week, well rested and totally sober).
Seems like opportunities for solutions and a whole niche around just knowing what fits where. Entrepreneurs dream.
But what type of carseats are you dealing with? If one is a booster, that is a whole different ballgame than 3 rear-facing seats.
What some people fail to think about when car shopping is that, without captains chairs, you’d have to remove a carseat from the 2nd row to fold it to get to the 3rd row.
Some of the cars with captains chairs have an immovable center console between the chairs. So a lot of the time it’s still a pain to get to the 3rd row
yeah that was what I was getting at, in the navigator we have has a console, the aviator has one, I believe the x7 has one as well, the escalade does not but next gen probably will, no idea on some of these other ones but I would imagine they do, the center console is great for phone storage, a/c controls, radio controls, etc. etc. all a moot point with little kids but makes life easy on adults in the backseat.
