Published on January 11, 2026 4:40 PM GMT
Our family has
half a
Honda Fit, and it’s great! Reliable, pretty good mileage, holds
our family of five plus a vacation’s worth of luggage, seats fold flat
for when I’m bringing sound equipment to dances. It would be nice,
though, to be able to seat more than five people.
None of the options are very good: you pay a lot for a sixth seat, not just in price
but in size and fuel economy. What I’ve wanted for years, though, is a six door car: the
same height and width as a hatchback, with three rows of seats. All
three rows would go in front of the rear axle, unlike a station wagon,
so you have plenty of room for luggage and no one is sitting in the
crumple zone. And you could fold both sets of rear seats flat, to get
a really great cargo area when you needed that.
I had a very hard time getting LLMs to draw what I had in mind
(they’re stubbornly convinced, like most people, that cars do not have
six doors) but I did eventually get Gemini to draw me a Fit Stretch:
This would add three feet, for a total of 16.5ft, a little shorter
than a Ford Explorer and most of a foot shorter than a Honda Odyssey,
and likely get gas mileage only ~10-15% below the traditional Fit.
When I look internationally, or historically in the US, where there
are more people who want this kind of combination of large carrying
capacity and small size, manufacturers consistently haven’t gone this
six door route. Just looking at Honda there’s the original
Odyssey, Freed, Mobilio, Stream, and Jade,
all with at most four hinged and/or sliding doors.
The wheelbase gets a little long, but it’s still manageable. The 2nd
generation Fit (best Fit!) had a wheelbase of 98.4″ (8.2ft) with 5.9″
of ground clearance, and this would add about 3ft, so we’re talking
134.4″ (11.2ft). This is just under the 136″ wheelbase of a
10ft-cargo RAM
ProMaster van. [1]
Why doesn’t anyone want to make one? I asked LLMs to speculate, and
the answers I got were:
It would cannibalize sales for an established brand, because
cheap high-capacity options attract families that would otherwise buy
much higher margin vehicles (SUVs, minivans).
Engineering for side-impact protection is much harder. You’d
need a second B-pillar on each side, and it would be hard to meet
crash targets without adding large amounts of weight.
It looks weird. People would say they want this on specs, but
then not actually buy it when they saw it on the lot.
The turning circle is high. You’d go from ~35ft to ~45ft.
This is big, though it’s less than the F150 which is surprisingly
popular as a family vehicle.
These aren’t great, but they don’t seem to me like they kill the
concept. I wonder if we’ll see someone make one at some point?
[1] The ProMaster has 6.9″ ground clearance, 1″ higher. You could
raise a stretched Fit by an inch, but you wouldn’t necessarily have
to: the 3rd generation Fit could be configured as low as 4.4″ with a
99.6″ wheelbase. Both 4.4″ clearance on a 99.6″ wheelbase and 5.9″
clearance on a 134.4″ wheelbase have a breakover angle of just over
10°.
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