I never thought that I would have to ask this but....

[Fisher, Scott]

"Tim Penasck" <tpenasack at mediaone.net> writes:

> Car seats for the Audi(s) - not the race car but the 100 wagon and
> maybe (oh the horror!) the S4. My wife read somewhere that fitting
> car seats into Euro cars can be difficult.

<tongue-in-cheek>

Oh, absolutely -- this is why everybody dumps their Volvos the instant they
have children...

</tongue-in-cheek>

This has not been my experience with a wide selection of Swedish, Italian,
and German automobiles -- nor with a couple of old British roadsters either,
come to think of it.  I have three kids, and each of them in turn has gone
through the car seat phase: first the rear-facing infant seat, then the
forward-facing toddler seat.  (Favorite image: driving my '71 MGB with my
oldest daughter about six or seven, top-down through a sunlit forest road
with golden beams slicing through the canopy of sycamores and live oaks; she
held her arms over her head, wiggled her fingers in the breeze, and at the
top of her baby lungs shouted out, "It's the best a kid could wish for!")

The only car I've owned in which fitting a child safety seat WAS difficult
was my 1967 Alfa Romeo GT 1300 Junior, where the rear-facing infant seat we
owned would not physically fit in the rear -- we had to belt it into the
front and put my wife in the back.  Since this isn't the Alfa digest, I
won't bother with details of fitment (though if you're thinking of carting
the little one home from the hospital in a 105 coupe, write back and I'll
give you the lowdown on making it work).

If your S4 is an ur-S4 (that is, 100/A6-chassis I5), you should have no
trouble fitting a safety seat in the center rear, and no trouble accessing
it either.  (If the S4 has highly-bolstered sport seats in the rear, all
bets may be off for the center position, depending on the room between the
inboard bolsters of the two outer seats.)

If you're talking about a neu-S4tt, the rear doors and rear-seat legroom
*are* smaller than the large-chassis Audis.  If so, kid-hauling is what your
100 Wagon can be for.

However, if you have one of the 100-sized cars, rest easy: we use a '93
100CSQ as our family vehicle.  All five of us fit very comfortably in it --
two big adults, one 14-year-old girl, her 10-year-old sister, and their
5-year old brother who just left the safety seat.  The longest trip we've
ever taken in this car were several round trips between San Francisco,
California and Portland, Oregon, followed thankfully by one last one-way
trip north.  We made most of them with all five of us in the car, safety
seat in the middle and big sisters belted in on either side.  It's the car
of choice whenever we need to go somewhere -- though we did take the CGT
last Sunday night when we went Christmas-tree shopping, planning to tie the
tree to the roof of the Coupe if necessary (turns out the tree lot
delivered).

About the only trouble putting a child safety seat in the 100CSQ is that its
center seat belt (lap only) is on an inertia reel, which can be a bit of a
fiddle compared to a manually adjustable belt (like the one in the center
rear of the CGT, which was our family car for two years, WITH car seat in
the middle and only two doors, so my personal metric for "difficult" may be
skewed).  The best procedure:

1.  Place a folded bath towel (or flannel receiving blanket) under the
safety seat to protect the upholstery while the seat is in place.

2.  One parent (hereinafter referred to as "Dad"), kneeling in the left-hand
rear seat, shoves down and back HARD on the safety seat, to compress it into
the upholstery several inches.

3.  The other parent (likewise, "Mom"), in the right-hand rear seat (because
that's where the belt comes out), pulls out a great length of belt and then
holds the end that comes out of the retractor so that it doesn't retract
yet.

4.  Mom feeds the belt through the mountings of the safety seat to Dad, who
grabs the tongue and inserts it into the buckle.

5.  Both parents then let the belt retract and catch.  Dad should continue
his down-and-back pressure on the safety seat, while Mom smooths the belt
out and feeds it carefully back into the retractor till it's snug when Dad
lets up his pressure on the safety seat.

It's really not difficult after the second or third time you do it, but it's
worth leaving the seat in place most of the time.

If it just doesn't work... well, you could always give ME the S4 and buy
your wife a Honda Odyssey. :-)

--Scott Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon