When Ben from the Dad Car YouTube channel took a brand new £88,000 Volvo XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid on a week-long family road trip with four children, he set out to answer one question: is this the ultimate family car?
He covered everything — boot space, electric range, ISOFIX points, seven-seat practicality, fuel economy, and whether 22-inch wheels are a genuinely terrible idea (they are). It’s a proper, real-world family review, filmed on an actual holiday with four actual children.
But the most telling moment of the whole video? It came from one of his daughters.
The XC90 is a seven-seater. With the rear seats up, the boot shrinks to around 265 litres — roughly the same as a compact city hatch. When Ben’s family tried to load a week’s worth of luggage for six people, it became clear pretty quickly that something had to give.
“Why can’t we just fold the rear seats down?”
“And then where are all four of you going to sit?”
That’s the fundamental tension with seven-seat SUVs: the moment you use the third row for passengers, the boot disappears. And if you have young children who need child seats, you face another problem — the XC90’s rear-facing third row has no ISOFIX, which Ben flags directly. If you need child seats in the back of a seven-seater, you need to check carefully whether the car actually supports it.
It was at this point that one of his daughters had a rather sharp suggestion.
“Dad, what about the Multimac?”
The family had a Multimac fitted in their own car. And in an instant, the boot problem was solved — because with a Multimac installed across the back seat of the XC90, the full boot was available again. All four children seated safely. Full luggage capacity restored.
Ben introduces the Multimac to viewers who might not know it: an R129-approved four-across child seat, available in various sizes, designed to fit almost any car — including every Volvo, right down to their smallest models.
He returns to it at the end of the video with a direct recommendation:
“If you’re watching this because you have or plan on having three or four children and you didn’t know about the Multimac — check it out before you pull the trigger on an XC90. Multimac make three and four across child seats that will fit in the back of every Volvo, even their smallest cars. And you might just find a smaller Volvo fits your family life even better.”
That’s not a throwaway line. It’s the closing thought of a 22-minute review of an £88,000 car.
The Dad Car review captures something that often gets missed in standard car reviews: the difference between a car that looks family-friendly and one that works for a family with multiple young children.
Seven-seat SUVs are frequently marketed as the answer for larger families. But as Ben’s review shows, fitting child seats in the third row, maintaining boot space, and keeping costs manageable are all genuine challenges that a large SUV doesn’t automatically solve.
The Multimac takes a different approach. Rather than changing the car to fit the family, it fits the family into almost any car — freeing up boot space, eliminating the need for multiple individual seats, and removing the ISOFIX juggle entirely. It anchors directly to the car’s chassis, not to ISOFIX points, which is why it works across such a wide range of vehicles.
Ben’s full Volvo XC90 review is well worth a watch — it’s one of the most genuinely useful family car reviews out there, not least because it’s filmed on a real holiday rather than a studio car park.
And if you’re working out how to fit three or four children safely and comfortably into your car — whether that’s an XC90, a smaller SUV, or something else entirely — get in touch with the Multimac team to find out which model fits your vehicle.
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