# Stretch Hatchback

Our family has [half](https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-car-one-year-in) 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](https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-cost-of-a-sixth-seat), not just in price but in size and fuel economy. What I've wanted [for years](https://www.jefftk.com/p/bethlehem-a-modern-wagon), though, is a [six door car](https://www.jefftk.com/p/six-door-cars): 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:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/honda-fit-stretch.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/honda-fit-stretch-big.png)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Odyssey_(international)#RA1), [Freed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Freed), [Mobilio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Mobilio), [Stream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Stream), and [Jade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Jade_(automobile)), 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](https://www.ramtrucks.com/ram-promaster.html) 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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