PRACTICALITY
DOGS, BABIES AND BAGS ARE REALITY, BUT WHICH HANDLES THEM THE BEST?
How do you measure a car’s practicality? Bootspace is an obvious metric, but rather one-dimensional. It’s how the packaging uses that space, and how accessible it is to the owner, that really matters. Nobody knows this more than an under-slept, over-stressed family man in a hurry. An ability to fip fop seats into the perfect load/people-carrying confguration and appropriately install/remove a child’s car seat, all in world-record time and one-handed because you have a screaming child in the other, is crucial.
So there’s our test right there. The rear seats will begin folded fat, doors closed. Against the clock and while gently cradling a Stiglet in one arm, it’s my job to raise them to their correct position and strap in a child’s seat.
Beside my impressive display of athleticism, notable performances include the show-of Discovery, for which you can raise all seven seats via a phone app, switches in the boot or a button on the central screen. The Stelvio, F-Pace and Bentayga all excel through the simplicity of just fipping the seats up with your spare hand, while the Peugeot and Duster let themselves down by trapping the seatbelt when you do the same. Dead last is the SQ7, which forces you to open the boot to raise the third row and run from one side to the other to release each half of the second row.
Luckily for the Audi, it covers its losses with a well-earned bonus point for being the most dog-friendly SUV in the world. How do we know this? When faced with eight open boots, a Bonio in each, Oakley the black Lab leapt into the Audi frst. Now that’s science.