Good evening!
I'm new to the classic Defender world, and am very excited to gift a 2007 D90 to my wife in 5 days (Puma, manual transmission).
The issue that will immediately come up is that she won't be able to take all 3 kids in it, at least not legally (although there's no airbag to be worried about, laws in this jurisdiction preclude our oldest from riding up front for another 4 years).
I have a great shop doing some work on the truck. Long term, we plan to convert to EV. Short term, we have looked for a middle seat, but the shifter makes it pretty tough.
The obvious thing (to me) would be to install a middle seat, but face it backwards. I suspect this would be torture with the stick shift, but once it's an EV those concerns will be gone. What is kind of silly about all of this is that the seat will be occupied by a 1.5 y/o (who weighs 45 lbs; big family!). Sadly given the 65 lbs limit of latch connectors (tell your friends! People often don't seem to know this) and the weight of car seats these days, I need a seatbelt (or will soon enough), so I guess this means we need a whole seat? Since I only need the grown-up chair to install a baby seat into, I'm interested in more creative solutions. Bolting the child seat to the floor? I guess if I'm concerned about one kid being in the front seat, can't imagine what the ticket might be for that...
Thank you in advance for any insights you might have.
