OT: Why are 3 door cars allowed on the road?

You can put shopping between the front and back seats without opening another door.

Absent central locking there's less chance of leaving a door unlocked.

Saves a bit of money

Fiestas sell to people on benefits

My Yaris has that problem. I guess it would make it easier forthe back seat passengers but I folded the rear seat down the day I bought it. I treat hatchbacks like little pickups with better styling than a Cowboy Cadillac.

My mother had always insisted on 4 doors for the family ride so I was surprised when she bought a two door Plymouth Gold Duster when she was in her 70's.

Then she explained the rationale. The back seat was such a pain to get in and out of she wouldn't be the designated driver when her equally old cronies wanted to go someplace.

We had a '51 Chevy with a steel dashboard. I liked to see where I was going so I'd sit forward with my hands on the dash to the point where there were two little hand prints where the finish was worn down to the primer.

The only restraint was my father's right arm if he saw a sudden stop coming. I survived.

If I want rain drops running down my neck I'll ride one of the bikes.

Yup I started appreciating that feature when I was gifted a 71 Gremlin. I haven't owned a car without a fold down back seat since. If you can't get a 10' stick of pipe in it with all the doors and windows closed, I don't want it.

My '66 Rambler had a split front bench. Each side folded down until it was level with the rear seat, turning the inside of the car into a full size bed. I used to lay pipe in that car all the time. ;-)

Delbert McClinton made mention of that car...

B Movie Box Car Blues

Next I caught a ride with a gambler's wife, She had a brand new lay down Rambler. She stopped outside of town, Laid the rambler down, Said she sure could dig it if I rode her, Said she sure could dig it if I rode her.

Yeah there were lots of parents that wouldn't let their daughter date a guy who had a Rambler.

I had an experience where I could not open the rear doors wide enough to fit a large parcel on the rear seats of a five door Cortina and we had to borrow a three door car (Viva IIRC) in a hurry.

Not that that's a very common scenario.

If memory serves, we fit a new dishwasher in its box into either a

Cindy Hamilton

Interesting that it was easier to fit this large parcel through the narrower gap between the 3-door Viva's B pillar and the tipped-forward seat, than through the opened door of the 5-door Cortina. Or did you fit it onto the front seats and then lift it over the backrests onto the rear seat?

In the same way that I'd never go for 2/3-door instead of 4/5-door, for ease of access to rear seats, I'd also never go for a saloon car (fixed rear seat backrest, half-height boot) rather than a hatchback. Why do people still buy saloon versions of cars that are mainly made in hatchback form? Are there any normal (ie not sports cars) nowadays that still have a fixed rear window and horizontal boot lid in saloon form rather than incorporating it in a larger tailgate (even if it has the notched shape of a saloon)?

I remember when my sister and her family came back from the US where they'd been living for a few years. They'd hired a car and we went along to Heathrow to take any extra hand luggage (everything else had gone by sea freight). My dad had a saloon car at the time, with a fixed rear window. I remember we had a major panic when we thought that we wouldn't be able to get their pushchair in either car because of the space taken up with child seats. I think we ended up with the pushchair wedged parallel with the rear window, padded with coats so it didn't bang on the glass. So much easier if the car had been a hatchback.

My Peugeot has finally succumbed to that fate: it is now the runaround car, used for the "dirty" jobs like taking lots of bags of garden waste and other rubbish to the tip (all the excess that won't fit in conventional wheelie bins) or buying building materials. I don't think I've folded the back seats up in about 2 years, apart from the days when I took it to have its MOT and the garage needed to see/check the rear seat belts. It's a shame that the head restraints have to be removed to fold down the rear seats and that the only place to keep them is in the front passenger footwell because there's no space in the rear seat footwells once the seat bases are folded down. I keep promising my Pug that I *will* Hoover him out and put his seats up so he looks like a "proper" car, but it's not worth it for the hassle of having to fold the seats down again for next time I go to the tip. With a 1/2 acre garden, we generate a *lot* of grass mowings each time I cut the lawns - too much to be able to handle with normal compost bins - so I have to cram 8 huge collapsible cylindrical plastic-hessian bags of mowings or shredded branches in the back - and I always do it the same day I cut the grass, so the mowings are still reasonably fresh and haven't started to leak evil-smelling juice out of the bags. Thankfully our recycling centres remained open throughout lockdown (unlike some local authorities' tips), otherwise we'd have an enormous mound of mowings to dispose of at a rate of one wheelie bin (one-and-a-bit hessian sacks) per fortnight. I've lined the carpet in the boot with a large piece of carpet underlay and plastic sacks to pad it slightly and to protect the carpet on the boot floor / back of backrests from dirt and scuffing.

I've actually been impressed with my 2 Renault 5s, 2 VW Golfs and Peugeot

- Golf Mark 3 1800: intermittent engine dying as I accelerated from rest when pulling out from a junction: car in and out of garage for about 3 months as they tried to provoke the fault so it generates diagnostics - finally diagnosed as a faulty track on accelerator-pedal potentiometer

- Peugeot 308: anti-pollution system problems on several occasions, producing on-screen warnings, sometimes with limp-home reduction in power or engine dying. It cost me a *lot* to have a new diesel particulate filter and new cat: the cat was only needed because the garage stripped its thread when trying to separate DPF from cat and said that meant new cat as well. I rationalise that with the through that the cat would have needed replacing anyway not *too* long after that time, so it was just a bit sooner than planned.

But the Pug is doing very well even at 185,000 miles: it's got a *lot* more low-rev torque than my wife's much newer Honda CRV with the same size (1.6) diesel engine but more turbo assisted so there's more power (but not necessarily more torque). I can drive my Pug like a diesel, whereas the Honda needs to be driven like a petrol, changing down one or even two gears lower than I would in the Pug when accelerating out of a roundabout or downhill-to-uphill transition. I think it is that the Honda doesn't like approaching a hazard in high gear (with low revs) and then applying power, at an engine speed which would normally pull fine. I wonder if the turbo is running out of "puff" (stored high-pressure air from turbo) ready for when it is needed to burn the extra fuel that the accelerator demands. Driving the two cars (Pug/Honda) requires *very* different driving styles ;-)

Someone in our neighborhood had one. One night a few of us put it up on the sidewalk.

My father bought a '62 Rambler Classic when I was a teenager. Parents of girls knew about that feature. I never forgave George Romney or his idiot offspring for that.

My brother had a Peugeot in the '60s that he really liked but I don't think a Peugeot, Citroen, or Renault has been seen in the US in decades unless it was a personal import. Maybe we're not good enough for snobby frogs...

Safest place for it.