Safe and sound in the back seat
WHO says six into five won’t go? When Christine and Justin Clark, the Rotherham parents of quadruplets, decided to downsize from their sevenseater SUV and opt for a smaller fiveseater Skoda Fabia, the question was obvious. How to fit everyone in?
With staff nurse Christine and lorry driver dad Justin sitting up front, they turned to a clever Multimac child car safety seat, which allows up to four children, from birth to age 12, to travel comfortably in the back.
‘Everything in our life has to be multisized and multipack, but when it comes to the car, we’ve been able to downsize thanks to the Multimac,’ said Mr Clark.
‘Even with a large seven-seater, we lose boot space due to the extra seats and parking a big car is a constant challenge. Add four toddlers into the equation and it’s exasperating.’
Opting for the Fabia with a four-seater Multimac means the family reduces their pollution and fuel bills, and enjoys more boot space for bags and prams than in their previous 2010 seven-seater Ford Galaxy.
One hurdle may be price: the fourseater range starts from £1,499 — or just under £375 per child. VOLVO, the first car-maker to test child seats in a crash in the Sixties, has launched a new range, focused on ‘design, comfort and convenience’.
Developed with Britax-Romer and tested at Volvo’s safety centre in Gothenburg, it features a more ‘breathable’ upholstery, comprising 80 per cent wool textile, which makes them smoother to the touch, more durable and better performing whatever the climate.
The rearward-facing infant seat is for children up to 13kg or nine months, the rear-facing child seat for children from nine months to six years, and the forward-facing Booster seat for three to ten-yearolds who have outgrown the previous one, will be available in June.
Volvo says the added comfort will encourage parents to keep children in rear-facing seats for longer, rather than transfer them ‘too early’ to a forward-facing seat. I HAD a gas this week driving super-green fuel-cell cars — and becoming the first motorist to fill them up at an innovative new hydrogen filling station that provides the fuel to generate electric power. Clean fuel firm ITM Power opened London’s first hydrogen filling station at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, and created the biggest gathering of super-green electric fuel-cell vehicles in Britain.
I drove the fuel-cell powered Hyundai ix35 and the Toyota Mirai — both of which proved nimble, quick, quiet and clean, though the Mirai had the advantage of being right-hand drive.
Both are on sale in Britain now, with Honda launching its fuel-cell Clarity later this year.
It’s part of a planned ‘hydrogen superhighway’ network of refuelling stations for the pollution-free cars. Four more are planned to encircle London in addition to one in Rotherham, close to ITM Power’s Sheffield HQ.
A three-minute refuel fills the tank with 5kg of pressurised hydrogen at £10 per kg, giving a range of between 300 and 500 miles for a £50 fill-up.
The firm aims to get the price down to £7 per kg to undercut petrol and diesel.
The filling station uses excess or ‘spare’ off-peak electricity on the grid to break down water — or H2O — through electrolysis into its building block parts of hydrogen and oxygen.
The cars work by ‘reverse electrolysis’, producing electricity to power the electric motors and pure water created by the hydrogen and oxygen atoms re-uniting to form H2O .