Diatribe: In reality, seating capacity ends at two

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It doesn’t make any difference if a car is a sedan, station wagon, coupe or convertible. If the seating capacity is listed as five, then deduct three. If it’s listed as six, you can deduct four.

This has angered me for some time.

You may ask, “Why, Mr. Al, does this anger you so?”

I’ll 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 1951 Packard could have served as a maintenance hangar for a B-36.

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 offers less interior room.

Where once you could dance 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, sometimes three. But just what kind of environment will these backseat passengers have? First of all they’d have to be — at best — young kids. Young kids don’t take up much room and they don’t complain much about being cramped into tight areas; they’re a lot like cats.

The older children become the more they realize they’re being crammed into a steel cell that rolls along on four tires. Eventually the rear seat becomes an easily accessible storage area rather than a passenger compartment.

Are sedans any more comfortable? Sure, if you have a Maybach or Jaguar XJL. But then there’s a different set of problems. Rear-drive cars have a driveshaft that connects the transmission to the rear end. 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.

That means the poor guy 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.”

Recently I was in a Lincoln Town Car, being driven to the airport. There was the driver and a person in the front seat, me and a colleague in the back seat. However, the foot area is huge and the platform is flat. Different story if a third part 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. Just as there’s a warning label stamped on the side of cigarette packs advising the user of the possibility of the product causing cancer, so, too, should there be a warning on vehicles saying something like “Repeated exposure to being shoehorned into the rear seat of vehicles can result in the passenger becoming hopelessly crippled.”

What the car-buying public should realize is that one doesn’t need to buy a Miata, Nissan Z or a Porsche 911 to own a two-seat vehicle — all cars are two-seat vehicles. Seat additional passengers at their own risk.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. E-mail him at vinikour@comcast.net.