Comments:
The Zafira originally didn’t do great on the Euroncap safety tests, but the 2005 model onwards has a very good rating.
The car itself is very similar in many ways to the Touran for features, and when it came to a purchasing decision, both actually size up very well together.
However, it had a couple of issues that in my opinion lets the car down somewhat.
The main concern is the way the back seats are adjusted - in the Touran and most models of its class, the back seats can be adjusted individually, But not in the Zafira.
For some completely odd reason, the Vauxhall team have decided that the rear seats will be treated as one - so a single lever will in fact cause the entire back row to shift backwards and forwards.
This means that if you do utilise the extra two rear seats in the boot, you have to force the entire back seat area to the same level, forward or backwards.
This is silly and impractical - as someone with three young kids of different ages, each of the children needs a different amount of leg room. With the Zafira design, the eldest child and the baby *must* have the same amount of leg room.
This also means it’s going to be harder to fit people into those two extra passenger seats in the boot - because the entire normal backseat area can only be in one poisition, this means you can’t fit the individual passengers in individually.
As someone who has carried people in this way, I’ve found that where a car allows the backseats to be adjusted individually, this means that the boot passengers can be more comfortably seated, with perhaps one chair or another slightly forward to accomodate different sizes.
Because of the Zafira’s design, all that’s out of the window.
It’s a bad planning decision, and it lets the entire car down when it is otherwise quite sleek and well built for its class.
