My question/observation was what you commented on after your first sentence. I've never had a 'hatch/saloon' so was unsure whether the space is as usable as the 'proper hatch'. The maths point I made you also answered. Octavia seems to be the staple recommendation on motors and I can see why if it performs as well as the numbers say.
Fair enough, that makes more sense.
It definately has a huge impact when it comes to putting things in for kids yea. A good example was our pram. Whilst the civic could swallow it easily, it had to go in sideways, essentially using 80-90% of the floor of the boot (unless you tipped it on it's edge or something which invariably leads to it falling over unless the boot is rammed). On the octavia the boot was long enough for the pram to go in folded, long ways. Essentially leaving you with 40-50% of the boot floor clear for loading more "normal" things to the side of it.
You can of course get around this simply by putting the pram on top of things, or things on top of the pram, but you cant beat the convenience of being able to load things side by side when you just want to get one or the other out. This logic then rings true as they got older and things like our fold up trike / balance bike etc could all fit long ways in something like an Octavia and it just gets easier. You then just have the huge amount of extra literage any time you do need to fill a boot for essentially no extra cost.
The Octavia is essentially a bit of a unicorn car. It's a focus size car, with a Mondeo size boot, and in all honesty, I'm not sure there is anything esle quite like it.
