With two or more children, maybe one or two of their friends, plus the grandparents, the practical benefits of a seven-seater car are clear. But there’s no reason why you should be landed with an old-school beast of burden that's dull to drive and stripped of equipment if you’re looking to haul people and their luggage. The car that fits that bill the best? The updated Mercedes-Benz V-Class - our 2020 Seven-Seater of the Year.
Take the near-vertical bodyshell of a commodious panel van, fit a swankily styled dashboard and trim it with a luxurious interior with adult-sized seating for six, seven or eight people depending upon your preferences and you have Mercedes’ V-Class – a clear winner of Parkers’ 2020 Seven-Seater of the Year Award. We’ve long-championed its people- and luggage-carrying abilities, but a mid-life facelift in 2019 embellished its appeal with new engines that are both more powerful and efficient than the motors they’ve replaced. Install those middle-row seats to face rearwards and you’ve got a positively sociable way to ferry large families about without having leave any of their kit and caboodle at home.
Given the continued rise of SUV sales and buyers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for upmarket brands, it’s no surprise that two decades after BMW entered the crossover arena, it’s now topped its offering with the gargantuan X7. Seven comfortable, adult-sized seats come as standard – although the middle row can be exchanged for a pair of luxurious captain’s chairs – in this plush SUV that handles with remarkable agility that belies its enormity. Cheap it isn’t, but you’re rewarded with high quality fixtures and fittings as well as a slew of contemporary technology to keep you and your passengers safe.
In the Best Medium Family Car shortlisting, we’ve already extolled the capacious virtues of this foursome, so imagine if some of the room in the boot for carrying stuff was exchanged for a pair of adult-sized seats turning them into value-for-money seven-seaters. Well, you don’t have to imagine as a third row of chairs is available on all four versions. Their integration is neat, although this configuration inevitably works better on the longer-wheelbase versions as there’s still a usefully large boot behind the back seats when they are in use, with easy access courtesy of the sliding rear doors and easy-to-fold middle-row chairs.
