Tesla's Family Planning

In a New York Times story from last week about Reva, the Indian carmaker that’s partnering with a U.S. company to build electric vehicles in upstate New York, I got hung up on a technical specification related to another EV manufacturer, Tesla Motors. Tesla’s Model S sedan, according to the NYT story, will accommodate seven passengers: five adults and two children.

I thought it was a misprint, or a misunderstanding. A sedan with seven-passenger seating? What’s Tesla going to do, put five people across the back seat? How many seat belts will this car have? Dan Neil, the Los Angeles Times’ car critic, seemed as baffled as I was.

Tesla cleared things up. The Model S, which will have a hatchback, not a trunk, will be getting a pair of child-suitable, rear-facing jump seats that can be folded down when not in use. Obviously, small kids who need car seats won’t be able to sit in these. But larger kids will be OK.

Seven-passenger seating has become an important selling point for some SUVs and crossover SUVs, due to what I call the “family effect”—although your own family may only consist of two adults and two kids and their pets and gear, families often find themselves hauling around other families’ kids, which demands an extra row of seating.

Interestingly, the jump-seat/fold-down seat configuration isn’t new: it could be found on station wagons in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s (here’s an example from a Volvo). When SUVs displaced wagons in the 1990s, these seats, reminiscent of the famous rumble seats from early 20th century cars, went away. Ironically, Tesla has brought the feature back in a sedan.