Mazda 5 and Car Seats

mdzsar

Does anyone have any experience with having 3 car seats in the Mazda 5? We rented the car last weekend with our 2 children, and we loved it! But, once our baby arrives, I suspect it may be difficult to get any children into the back without having to remove the car seats in the middle bucket seats. Any help?

dona83

Place the rear facing baby seat on the 2nd row behind the driver seat for easy access to the driver. If both children need to be on booster seats, then they're likely small enough to fit between the two 2nd row seats anyway and out the passenger side sliding door. If just one of them needs to be on a booster seat, Install that seat onto the 3rd row. There's no need for them to egress on the driver side regardless.

gambit293

So if you're trying to put a child seat into a car with no middle seat, is it generally better to use the seat behind the passenger or the driver? I've seen a lot of contrary advice on the Internet.

Behind driver seat:
--easier for driver to immediately access before and after trip
--driver instinctively protects his or her side of the car when driving (?)

Behind passenger seat:
--easier and safer for curbside unloading
--statistics apparently show fewer serious collisions on passenger side (?)
--easier for driver to "touch" the child from the driver seat
--assuming taller spouse is driving, there is more likely to be more clearance behind passenger

Any other thoughts? :confuse:

vg33e power

I personally have my rear-facing child seat behind the my seat (driver's side) because the usual ingress and egress for passengers seems to be on the passenger side regardless of having a slider on the drivers side. Plus, I have the touring model so the passenger side 2nd row seat stores the center fold out table/cupholders which I did not want the car seat to intefere with since it is accessed from time to time. Just my $0.02