Opinion: it's time to bring back the Volvo V70 and its rear-facing jump seats

OK, OK. The Volvo V70 MkII isn’t really a guilty pleasure. It is simply a Good Car. As most estates are. But my guilty pleasure is that, well, it might just be better to passenger in than drive.

Why? Because: jump seats. I’m a Nineties child, which meant growing up I didn’t have Angry Birds to keep me quiet (side note: is that still popular these days?), and I Spy quickly got boring. Back then, one of my friend’s parents had a Volvo V70. And forget calling shotgun for the front seat – it was in the boot where the real fun was.

Because it was there that the rear-facing jump seats, er, sat. If you know, you know: they used to flip up from the boot floor – rendering the luggage space and, we imagine, rear visibility, absolutely useless – but never mind all that, because all that mattered to me back then was having fun. Ah, to be young and carefree again.

The mission was simple: get a reaction from whatever poor motorist was following you. Cue waving, pulling a silly face, or brandishing whatever soft toy you had to hand all in the hope of getting a wave, thumbs up, anything. No, not a rude gesture, I was a nice child, thank you very much. But hours of fun, in other words.

It wasn’t the only car to get them of course – various Mazdas, Mercedes and Peugeot estates featured them, plus several SUVs and lately the Tesla Model S – but I only ever experienced them in the V70. Now though, because of safety, buyer preference for forward-facing third row seats or some other nonsense, they’ve pretty much disappeared completely.

As has the humble estate. Consumer preference for crossovers has slowly killed them off, and even Volvo – long the estate king – has suffered. The V70 disappeared back in 2016, the V90 earlier this year at the second time of asking, meaning the only Volvo estate still available on our shores is the V60. And for how much longer is anyone’s best guess.

Which all means that the age of the jump seat is long gone. The youth of today won’t ever know what they missed out on. Sad times.