Buy a longer-wheelbase, five-door Land Rover Defender 110 and the firm will offer you a choice of five-, six- or seven passenger seats, while the elongated 130 seats eight in a two, three, three formation. Sadly, for legislative reasons, you can’t order the latter with the jump seat in between the driver and front seat passenger, which would otherwise have made it a nine-seater (and, in the UK at least, in need of registration as a minibus). However, that probably won’t stop some people from retrofitting jump seats to secondhand examples (or even seven-seat 110s) in years to come.
Even without this as an official option, though, this car has impressive versatility. The seven-seat Defender has third-row chairs that are a little smaller than those of the related Discovery’s, but still perfectly usable by children, teenagers and smaller adults. In the 130 you can have all eight on board and still have a very usable 400-litre boot, although the trade-off is the car’s vast 5358mm length that makes it something of a squash and a squeeze in most parking spaces.
This is also an expensive car, with even the very cheapest five-door passenger-car models pushing £50,000 – but, unlike the old Defender, it drives nearly as well as almost any luxury SUV of its size and type, has a broad range of modern electrified powertrains, and has off-road capability to spare. As a big, desirable family workhorse, you couldn’t ask for much better.
The unuttered truth about full-sized seven-seat SUVs, which many of the cars in this chart confirm, is that most of them don’t come for the same price as a full-sized MPV. The Kia Sorento, which has just entered a fourth model generation, used to be a rather glorious exception to that rule. Now that it has taken on a more premium look and feel, however, it’s not quite the bargain it once was. However, no matter whether you buy a diesel, petrol hybrid or plug-in hybrid, you’ll get seven good-sized seats, which makes the buying process nice and simple – and is one of the reasons that we recommend it in such unqualified terms.
Kia’s latest redesign for the car has brought an all-new model platform, an eye-catching exterior and a roomy and fairly classy-feeling cabin. The interior benefits from the car’s biggish outward size (it’s a closer match for a Land Rover Discovery than the Discovery Sport against which it’s priced), and the third row would even be usable by adults provided they’re not particularly tall (although there are only Isofix child seat points in the second row).