Back in April, after having a new Berlingo as a hire car in France, one thing that I wrote (tinyurl.com/3ad4l3z) was: "My wife told me that while passenger knee room was fine, the footwell was not quite as long as in the old Berlingo, so she could not stretch out her legs."
This came back to me today. My parents have a new Honda Jazz, and my mother told me that one thing that she really doesn't like about it is the fact that even with the passenger seat all the way back, she cannot stretch her legs straight out - which, on a long journey, she sometimes wants to do. (I totally agree, by the way.)
So, I tried it myself, and can confirm that in the front passenger seat in a Jazz, I cannot even get near to stretching my legs. In the (old) Citroen Berlingo, I can do it, but only just. In our old Ford Ka, I can stretch out easily in the front, even though I'm not exactly short.
I'm surprised. I would never have thought that the tiny Ka was easily the roomiest of these cars in this respect.
But more than that, I notice that it is the newer cars that have the shorter footwells (OK, I admit that the sample size is rather small), and hence that there does seem to be a trend for the front passenger footwells to be getting shorter, even though cars are tending to get longer. Could this be true?
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passenger legroom / footwell length new
passenger legroom / footwell length new