Car seats my man. We like saving the lives of our tiny people on car crashes

Doesn't sound all that superb to me. Skoda mediocre

poprock wrote:

As a culture, we used to fit five people in small five seater cars. Dunno what happened over the decades, but we don’t seem to do that any more.

Maybe it’s that everyone’s expectations have changed. More personal space for each passenger, or something. Or maybe legislation around child seats has meant more space is needed to fit them in properly. I’m sure if I had kids of my own I would understand it better.

It's child seats. You can't get 3 (especially if one is a baby seat) in the back of most 5 seaters.

Playing the dumbo card, my next question is ‘why are child seats so big?’ There’ll be a perfectly good reason, I’m sure. Smarter people than me will have already asked that question many times, because if they could be smaller then they would be.

I know the fact that cars are bigger than they used to be is blamed on safety regulations. Crumple zones, strengthening structures, and so on. Maybe child seats are the same. Maybe there’s a basic underlying truth that bigger equals safer.

Or maybe it’s about perception as much as fact - maybe bigger just feels safer and that’s driven the product design over the years.

Unless you have really fat kids and on this I cast no judgement.

Paul the sparky wrote:

Doesn't sound all that superb to me. Skoda mediocre

I always assumed it must be ironically named, like the Skoda designers having a bit of a laugh about their erstwhile reputation

Funkstain wrote:

GooberTheHat wrote:

Unless:

GooberTheHat wrote:

https://www.multimac.com/range Maybe you could use one of these instead?

Sure but pricey AF

Yeah, absolutely. I guess that ties in with this:

poprock wrote:

Playing the dumbo card, my next question is ‘why are child seats so big?’ There’ll be a perfectly good reason, I’m sure. Smarter people than me will have already asked that question many times, because if they could be smaller then they would be.

I know the fact that cars are bigger than they used to be is blamed on safety regulations. Crumple zones, strengthening structures, and so on. Maybe child seats are the same. Maybe there’s a basic underlying truth that bigger equals safer.

Or maybe it’s about perception as much as fact - maybe bigger just feels safer and that’s driven the product design over the years.

Seats could be smaller and meet the safety requirements but they would be much more expensive.

Funkstain wrote:

Old car "child seat"

Yeah, but look how much happier they were!

My mum used to take a couple of fat old ladies shopping every week, me and my sister wedged in the back of our Metro with one of 'em. Literal minutes of gathering coins towards the petrol when we got home. 25p each or summat. Walked to the other end of the high street to get their carrots 2p cheaper.

Funkstain wrote:

We drive a Skoda superb which is pretty vast. It can’t fit three standard child seats in the bench.

You want an S max mate

Sadly the Volvo estate isn’t what it was

We had an estate everyone thought was a Lada but wasn't (FSO, maybe), and did the same. Big cushions out the garage thrown in. Ideal for playing games on the flat surface in the middle, not so great for safety.

No wonder we needed all those DANGER ads in the '80s. Remember, never hold onto a card rack on wheels out the back of a Rascal.

Drove to Cardiff and back over the weekend, got home last night. Three stops each way, the '08 Mazda 3 performed admirably well, bless her.

Surprised myself I actually done it, was a bit nervous beforehand.

poprock wrote:

Porsche’s new ‘customer race car concept’, the Mission R.

Just got another email about this, which I thought was very cool. Here’s the car being tested and refined by one of Porsche’s works drivers.



Most manufacturers just build concept cars for styling, they don’t develop them as working vehicles (or if they do, it’s only to drive at 5mph into a show building). Porsche make concepts for real - so this thing is a finished, complete, racing car already. This is why Porsche’s concept cars tend to turn into real retail models relatively quickly.

Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus are a small car maker and racing team. Basically, Jim Glickenhaus is an unfeasibly rich man who likes cars. He used to pay ridiculous amounts of money for Ferrari to make him unique one-off supercars. Then he started hiring designers to make his own, based on Ferrari chassis. Eventually he moved on to designing and building his own racing cars from scratch, and entered a team at Le Mans. They’re doing very well, thank you. So now he’s got a car company, and their first roadgoing cars (based on their Le Mans racers) will be arriving with customers next year. I vaguely know one guy who has bought one, and he swears it’s the best mega-car experience he’s ever had (the man has quite a collection already).

ANYWAY.

Glickenhaus decided he wanted to try off-road racing as well. So his team have been designing and building prototypes to enter the Baja 1000. The past two years they’ve won Class Two, and this year they’re going all-out. They’re entering a hydrogen-powered off-road buggy in the top class - Class One. They aim to win. It would also make them the first non-petrol/diesel vehicle to even finish the race.

Look at this thing. It’s ace.



Glickenhaus is an entertaining man. The press release announcing this hydrogen beast ends with the following:

We still haven't heard from our challenge to Elon to race against us at the Baja 1000 in 2022 with his Cyber Truck.

Plenty of room to fit it, I reckon.