Freestar rear seating

You are correct to make seats that do not need to be removed, but just fold into the floor, the seat construction must be altered. The situation is not unique to Ford. Honda and Chryslers new vans with foldaway seats have the same problem. Chrysler ever cheapened the middle seat to allow them to be folded into the floor. My guess is on average buyer rarely uses the bask seat for passengers nearly as often as they use the van to haul items that require the older heavy type seats to be removed. Designers figure the fold down convenience is worth the small confront loss I suppose.

mike hunt

Ken wrote:

I don't own a van, but if I were, I would rarely need to reconfigure the seats. In any of my current cars I rarely fold down the back seat to accommodate bulky cargo, so I wouldn't need to take out seats all that often.

I don't know if this is true for the Windstar, but I think with the older Caravans you could put the back seat in the middle seat's position. This way you could hold five people and have a huge cargo area, which would be good for our family of 5 on long distance trips (I've never liked crawling into the back row of a van anyways.) I would prefer this to folding seats, because I could always take the seats out if I needed the flat floor (yes I'm aware that they're quite heavy)

I know someone who is a Caravan owner and was quite disappointed when they saw the flimsy seats in the new Stuff-n-Go system while looking at a 2005 Caravan. I think it might sound good in practice, but if the seats are uncomfortable, I don't think it would be worth saving the five minutes of pain taking the seats out for the hours of pain while traveling.

Do you have a Windstar?