6 Adults and A Toddler In One Vehicle and Everyone Was Comfortable [ADVERTORIAL]

I’ve been driving around a new 2014 Nissan Pathfinder, a vehicle bigger than any I have ever owned, and I realized just how much I liked it when our family got together for some holiday adventures. With any of the previous cars I’ve owned, I would have scoffed at the ideas of fitting six adults and a toddler in one vehicle for a trip to Denver, but the 2014 Nissan Pathfinder proved it can be done and done comfortably.

A few weeks ago when I got the keys to a 2014 Nissan Pathfinder; I wondered how I would like such a big vehicle, but after driving it around through the holidays, I’m pretty convinced it made my life easier in so many ways.

The crescendo came on a trip to see Zoo Lights in Denver. We had my whole side of the family gathered to go to Denver on a chilly night. This included myself, my wife, our toddler, my parents, my sister and her 6-foot-plus husband. Along with us, we all had heavy coats and hats, a stroller, a diaper bag, and a car seat. That’s a lot of stuff. Any other time, we would have had to take two cars, separated our group for the hour drive down and back and wasted a lot of extra gas to make the trip. But this time, I had the Pathfinder.

We had the car seat in, every adult in a seat belt (with leg room), the stroller and all our winter gear in the back. I had one of those epiphanies on the drive down of, “So, this is why people have big vehicles.”

The ride was comfortable for everyone. The climate control allowed those in the back to adjust how warm they wanted to be while we up front could adjust our own, I had some Christmas music playing lightly on the stereo (which sounds pretty amazing), and I even got to show of the touch-screen display and used GPS navigation to guide us to our destination.

The pathfinder also has, not just a back up camera, but cameras on all four sides of the vehicle! This way you can get a virtual birds-eye view of the vehicle as you back out. It also has proximity sensors to alert you if you're about to back into something and you can put the camera in the front on to see exactly how close you are to something ahead of the vehicle. Pretty cool stuff.

Now, here’s the cool part; loaded down with that many people the Pathfinder didn’t lag at all on the highway. It was a smooth ride as the CVT transmission cycled through thousands of gear ratios so we never felt it ‘shift’ and there was enough power that, as a driver, it didn’t feel much different with seven passengers than it did with one.  All of this while still averaging over 20 miles per gallon. That’s pretty impressive to me for a vehicle of that size (and there is a hybrid model available that could get you even more gas mileage).

Seven people in a 2014 Nissan Pathfinder is not only do-able, it’s downright enjoyable.