Cars Used to Hold More People

Watching reruns of old shows on Hulu, we’re served up lots and lots of ads for cars (not nearly as many as the ads for insurance companies or prescription medications). What cracks me up about these ads is that many will brag about being 7-passenger SUVs. So, my Gen-X brain, immediately conjures up an image of a Mustang. This is because back in my day, we used to cram a lot more people into cars.

Mom had a Cherokee Chief for years. This is the classic Jeep Cherokee, which I guess if there was an ad on TV for it today would be described as a 5-passenger car, but we knew better. Countless times we would cram 4 people into the backseat. There were only three seatbelts, but none of them were shoulder belts, so we would simply have two of the passengers share a belt. Of course, that was only six people, and sometimes we had more than that. Thankfully that hatchback vehicle had a roomy trunk that could easily hold a couple of more passengers. As long as you didn’t sit facing out the back window it wasn’t that bad of a ride. If you sat facing out the back window, be prepared for motion sickness.

I ran on the cross country team in high school, and once or twice during the season my coach would come up with the idea for us to do a slightly further away run for practice. (At least once we had to do this tied together because my coach could be sadistic like that.) Also my coach drove a Mustang. I went to a small high school, with a pretty small co-ed cross country team. So, while we couldn’t all fit in her car to be transported to the away trail, she would manage to shuttle us all over there in just two trips. How this was accomplished was by folding down her backseat so that four boys could lay down in the back looking more or less like sardines and then having two girls share the front passenger seat.

But all of this pales in comparison to the amount of people we used to fit in our friends’ station wagon. It looked something like this:

Photo of a vintage green station wagon in green.

I am not exaggerating when I say that we used to routinely fit 12 people in that car. Six adults would ride in the front and backseats of that car, then six of us kids would ride in the “way back” aka the trunk area of the car. For the safety conscious out there, I should note that there are no seatbelts in the way back. What can I say? Things were different back then. We all survived those packed car rides unscathed.

I wouldn’t suggest trying this today. I have no doubt that those advertised 7-passenger vehicles could easily hold way more, but we live in an age of seatbelt laws. You drive down the road today with 6 kids in your trunk, you’ve got a very good chance of getting yourself a ticket. Not that I would expect any of today’s bike-helmet-buying, sunblock-using parents would go for this plan. Big SUVs have gotten bigger and more prevalent, and pickup trucks have become ginormous, but otherwise I would say that cars aren’t all that different in shapes and sizes than they were back in the 1980s. Names have changed—the crossover SUV is just a station wagon with a different name, and people, for sure, have changed.

—Alissa