Kicking tires

Well, with Buttercup's impending arrival, Mike and I have to consider getting a new car. My little Ford Focus wagon, which has served us so well for 7 years, just doesn't have the rear-seat room for an infant seat plus a child safety seat. Because we're both tall, when Biscuit was in the infant seat, secured behind the passenger side, the front seat needed to be all the way forward, so that those times Mike or I were riding together, our knee caps would be jammed into the glove box.
Every time I've had to get a car, the process (like other major decisions, say, voting) has made me feel very much an outsider to the mainstream and wondering what average other people are thinking about. We would like a station wagon, because we simply can't deal with minivans or SUVs. Simple enough? Ha!
Our choices are relatively few: VW, Volvo, Subaru, Mazda (about to be discontinued). Yup, that's it. None of them are especially affordable. Having tested three so far, only the VW Passat Wagon actually had the room to comfortably accomodate both an infant seat and a tall passenger. But wait... these are family cars, right? So just as the child safety seat requirements have been getting bulkier and bulkier, the station wagon has been getting more and more compact. So odd.
No wonder people feel like they HAVE to get an SUV if they are procreating. At a time when oil is about to hit $100/barrel... All we need is a few more inches, but we're flummoxed. Maybe we can keep cramming into our current car, the kids will be safe even if we end up mangled into the dashboard ourselves in an accident.
The salesmen are another big impediment, though I try not to hold them against the cars we test. We take the infant seat along to dealerships with us, we set it behind the passenger seat, we run the front seat back to the max, we ask Mike to sit and show his (2 inch) legroom, we look at the oily car salesman gushing on obliviously about the "waterfall panel design" ("this is really cool, guys, you're going to love this"). We struggle to find the latches for the seat, twisting into pretzels while juggling Chloe's waning patience, and they chirp "so do you think you're ready to drive one home today?" They read off the EPA label trumpeting "21 mpg in the city, 26 on the highway, wow" which my Escort had no trouble beating 15 years ago.
Wow indeed.