Apparently as a newborn, I got from A to B in the footwell of an old MG! This sounds shocking to me today when I agonise over putting my daughter in a car that doesn’t have a five-star ANCAP rating! As parents, safety is forefront in our minds, and so it should be with our precious cargo on-board.
For more than seven years I have been fortunate enough to drive a different car every week, a perk of being married to a car journalist and something that before child was just fun for me to plan our weekend excursions around. New to Australia and keen to explore our surroundings, the latest two-seater convertible and some fine weather was a good prompt for a trip along the Great Ocean Road for example! Or the latest four-wheel-drive meant a camping trip, damper, some off-roading and a few nights under the amazing outback sky! Oh I remember those days… just!!!
Fast forward to hundreds of cars later and during the weeks leading up to the birth of our daughter Tulsi, we had a string of sports cars; the BMW 640i, the Aston Martin Vantage and our dream car the new Mazda MX-5. All were very interesting when my tummy protruded as far forward as I am tall (162cm), making getting in and out of the cars as tricky as it was to reach both the steering wheel and pedals at the same time!!
The salesman at the Aston Martin showroom was very concerned about me driving in their brand new quarter of a million dollar car so close to my due date!! I think he feared my waters breaking and ruining the beautiful, soft leather interior! And driving the MX-5, three days prior to Tulsi’s birth, I found the steering wheel rubbed against my tummy when it turned!!
This was maybe the first time I really thought about the practicality of the cars we were driving, until it really hit home a week later when Tulsi was born and we had a Toyota Hilux 4WD that I couldn’t come home from the hospital in because I’d had a caesarean, I could hardly walk and definitely felt like I could not climb up the two big steps to get into the passenger seat!! I am sure some women manage it but I was definitely too scared the contents of my stomach would empty out onto the bitumen car park!!
Six weeks later, my caesarean healing nicely and having been given the okay to drive again, I ventured out thinking it would be just like before only with a baby on board… Naively in hindsight!
I had no idea it would take us half an hour just to get from the house and all loaded into the car! Let alone the fact I would move to sitting in the back of the car next to Tulsi’s child seat when my husband was driving (I don’t think I’d even sat in the back seats of a car since I learnt to drive!!)
Or I’d spend what felt like half my life driving laps of our neighbourhood trying to get Tulsi to fall asleep, or the other half parked somewhere trying to get some sleep myself because I’d been up all night trying to get her to sleep and she had now fallen asleep in the car two streets from home! Or me pulling over and feeding her in the back of the car because I just couldn’t handle the letdowns due to her screaming in the back!!
I didn’t realise everything would change and that we’d have a car-hating daughter! Tulsi has screamed hysterically for every second was in a car for at least the first year of her life, except for when she has passed out with exhaustion or admitted defeat and only to be woken up by a reversing beeper or I’ve veered slightly and a shrieking lane departure alarm has sounded!! And the hysterical screaming resumed.
Even now I still hear “no, no, no, no” in her gorgeous little chirpy tones at the suggestion of going in the car!
Quite quickly I realised how practical or impractical different cars are when every week we had to take the child seat out of one and install it into another. For example some cars had very bucket-shaped seats, making it hard to correctly install an infant capsule or seatbelt buckles that would stick in my bum when I’d sit in the back next to Tulsi’s child seat, or top tether points in really impractical places or ISO Fix that was hard to connect to or there would be no cup holder that would hold my cup of tea and my large water bottle.
The list started to become endless and then I found other mums and dads asking me about the same things:
It was only because I was in a different car each week with a child that I started to realise just how impractical some cars are. Even some of them marketed as ‘family’ cars!!
And on the rare occasions I got to drive alone, on a quiet country road, with my favourite tunes playing and could pretend for just a moment I was 17 and carefree again, was it actually fun for me to drive and was the stereo any good?! And could I wear a ponytail?!?!
Since having our daughter I have noticed that it is a time when many people change their cars for one that is more practical for all the reasons I talk about above and some reasons they don’t even know about yet!! Many people buy their new car while they’re pregnant in preparation for their expanding family and life changes. Almost all our friends ask for our advice and opinions before making their purchase, which led me to start collating the information from our cars each week and eventually producing BabyDrive.com.au!
Having now test driven around 100 cars over two years, with a baby on board, various age and size passengers and different configurations of child seats that I can give very practical and honest advice based on this experience.
I hope the site will be useful and informative for new mums and expanding families when looking for practical information that will help them buy a new car, from one little family to another
