Saloon vs Estate
Posted: Tue 17 September, 2013 Filed under: Change, Domestic, Driving, Getting Organised, Thoughts 2 Comments »Over the last couple of weeks, for one reason and another I’ve been lugging a lot of stuff around in the car. Shopping, tip runs, that kind of thing. It’s still be OK, but it’s made me conscious of how different it is to do this kind of stuff without an estate car.
With Mondeo, I simply dropped the back seats, and could chuck any amount of stuff in there – the loadspace was amazingly capacious. It gobsmacked people on a few occasions, the sheer amount (or size) of stuff it could handle with no problem whatsoever.
With Saab, it’s a different prospect. I can still get stuff in, but it’s far more of a hassle, and there’s a few things that simply become impossible – or at best a nightmare. What would have been a simple ‘chuck it in the back‘ becomes more about ‘how the hell am I going to do that?‘.
I’m not unhappy with Saab at all – it’s doing me very nicely in general – and this is by no means a deal-breaker. What it will do, though, is make me think more about what I want as and when Saab goes to that great garage in the sky.
And you know what? I think the next one may well be an estate again. I don’t need that loadspace often – but when I do, I really like being able to just have it there, ready for use.
We’re the same with our VW Touran. It’s not often we meet the space but the middle row of seats can be removed (the back row folds completely flat), and all of a sudden I’m driving a van. Massive load space.
And then you can fold up the back row of seats and you can seat 5 adults and two children very comfortably.
We don’t even “edit” what we pack when we go away anymore. Put the roof-box on, and bring everything. Everything.
I can get a large chest freezer in the back of my skip. Erm, I mean Broom. 206. The joy of older cars is that you don’t have to worry that you’ll reduce their residual value by carrying any sort of ‘stuff’ around.
As we always buy new cars (best to know their history, it means you can safely keep them till they die, so it’s a very cost-effective choice for us) it’s hard to decide when the line is crossed when one *can* carry junk.
At present it’s a hard decision as too much weight in a 13 year old car will hasten its end (or need for expensive work), but a one-year old is still too new to tarnish. Perhaps the answer is, when it no longer smells of new car?