Space To Spare
by David Finlay (26 May 08)

When the conversation turns to MPVs you occasionally hear people complaining that the ones which can carry seven people can't also carry all their luggage at the same time. To me, this has always seemed rather unfair, since it's unreasonable to expect that one vehicle would have all that interior space.

In fact this isn't always true - certainly not in the case of the Volkswagen Caddy Maxi Life. Since the Caddy is sold through Volkswagen's Van Centre network it may have escaped your attention, so a word of explanation is perhaps in order: the current Caddy was launched as a compact van in March 2004, and the Caddy Life MPV derivative came along that summer. In February 2008 Volkswagen introduced the Caddy Maxi, which was a whopping 18 inches longer than the standard version, while the Caddy Maxi Life MPV you see here arrived a month later.

Those 18 inches make just the world of difference. Tall journalists often talk about checking a car to see if they can "sit behind" themselves - in other words, if they can comfortably sit immediately behind the driver's seat once they have positioned it to their own liking.

Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it isn't. The Caddy Maxi Life is one of the very few cars in which I can sit behind myself twice. Forget all that talk you sometimes hear about "occasional" rear seats - the ones in the third row are full-sized items (with, usefully, proper access so you don't have to clamber around to reach them), which means that the Maxi Life is unquestionably suitable for transporting seven large adults.

And I do mean large. There's a storage compartment running the entire width of the interior above the heads of the driver and front seat passenger, but the top of my head didn't come close to touching it, and I'm six foot three. There's no similar obstruction in the second or third rows, so unless your name is Leonid Stadnyk your hair is unlikely to come into contact with the roof lining.

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