Top 10 must-have accessories for family cars

As a mum of two, family car journalist and founder of BabyDrive.com.au I have tried many accessories in hundreds of different cars with my family over the last eight years, so here are my family’s top ten family-car accessories for much calmer and better organised family car journeys.

One of the go-to ways for entertaining kids of all ages in the car is to pop a show on an iPad or tablet for them to watch. This is helpful whether they are tiny and screaming or bored tweens whose in-car vocabulary is limited to “when do we get there?”

iPad holders come in all sorts of designs, some of which fit on the back of the front seats, or clip to the back of the front headrests. Others are held in the rear cup holders or on telescopic arms so that they can be moved to the optimal viewing position. Depending on the age of your children, you’d want one that the little ones can’t reach. But once they’re older and/or more responsible, it might be time to upgrade to one they can reach for themselves, but without them developing a bad ‘tech neck’ posture in the process.

My kids LOVE being creative and busy. Art activities will keep them entertained forever. And like most kids, they are bottomless pits when it comes to food. See our snack ideas for kids on road trips advice here.

Some cars, like the VW ID. Buzz, have built-in tray tables that are great for kids to keep busy on car journeys, and have everything the kids need, within easy reach. If your car doesn’t have inbuilt tray tables, you can buy activity travel trays that are compact, portable, and can be loaded up with snacks, drinks and activities to keep young passengers occupied and nourished for long car journeys.

Your biggest space in the car, the boot, can sometimes feel like a dumping ground for everyone’s school bags, sports gear, pram, scooters, craft projects, you name it. Having an organised boot that’s divided up can make life simpler and easier for everyone to access their things more easily.

You can buy multiple styles of boot dividers, and some car manufacturers sell their own as accessories. The Nissan X-TRAIL has great in-built boot dividers, and the new Audi Q5 can even be supplied with a dog basket for the boot, so you can travel safely with your fur babies separated from the rest of your luggage.

Whether due to the kids’ dirty shoes or their school bags draped in seat-scratching trinkets, the rear seat of the car is a prime target for damage inflicted by kids. So back-seat scuff protectors are a must-have for your family car.

They usually hang from the front headrest, or attach to the seatback, protecting the back of the front seats. Some include storage pockets and even iPad holders. Once your child is facing forward in their child seats, their feet are forever reaching the front seatback.

If your family is like mine, the kids think that long car journeys are one long buffet. Having a little rubbish bin in the cup holder or door bin means you can gather everything as you go along, rather than having kids littering the back seats and footwells with wrappers and discarded items (I’m retching thinking of the things I’ve found), making the clean-up at the other end a simpler task. Well, you’ll still have to gather up their toys...

Skoda and Volvo are among the brands that include rubbish bins in their cars, but there’s a wide range of accessory ones to fit any type of vehicle.

To solve in-car clutter, you can get handy organisers that attach to the back of the front seats or between the rear seats, if you only have two passengers back there. They vary greatly in how elaborate they are, and, of course, in price.

These accessories can help greatly with holding toys, drinks, snacks and activities to keep the kids occupied on long journeys and, in theory, they can put it all away as they go along too (that’s the aim anyway).

Floor mats in the footwells are a must for me in family cars, as they collect all the sand, mud, crumbs and spills that kids create, and you can just take them out and empty them. My favourites are rubber mats because they can be hosed off and dried easily, especially if they are a snug fit and dished around the edges to prevent as much debris from reaching the carpets as possible.

Driving the GWM Haval H6 PHEV recently, I noticed it had black leather-like floor mats that covered the whole rear footwell area and provided impressive coverage at the front too. These were a great compromise between carpet and rubber mats, as they are plush-feeling, but wipe clean easily, too.

As soon as you put child seats in the back of your car, they start to cause marks and indents in your upholstery. Add on top of that years of spills, crumbs and other unthinkable messes, and you end up with permanent damage, or at the very least a petri dish on wheels hosting a festering cocktail of germs.

You can obtain mats to protect your upholstery from child seat scuffing and indents, but unless you stick to a no food or drink in the car rule, attaching washable seat covers before installing your child seats is a better investment.

Living in Australia, the sun and UV are a high concern, and never more so than with our kids. We have all seen cars driving along with towels or cloths strung up across the rear windows to shield the little passenger in the back from the sun.

Privacy glass provides limited shade, and not all factory tints include UV protection. If you have a dual-cab ute and rear-facing child seats, the back window being so close can be a real source of glare for them (I found models with a sailplane provide some useful shade if the sun is high in the sky).

Quite a few large family-focused cars now come with in-built window shades for the second-row windows, and some, such as the Kia Carnival, have them for the third row too. It’s good to see medium SUVs such as the Mitsubishi Outlander fitted with shades as standard (albeit on high-spec versions only).

A big upgrade from the sock-type mesh you see flapping about on family cars, or shades with suction-cups, are dealer-fit or aftermarket window blinds specifically for your make and model of vehicle to provide maximum shade for your kids.

This is our family go to; the fun bucket. A big, colourful plastic bucket that lives in the boot of the car or sometimes gets squished into a rear footwell and gets used for multiple purposes.

Sometimes we throw in it everything we need for a day out, and carry it out to the car. It might get used later that day to hold all the wet gear, if we’ve been to the beach or a bush walk.

At the end of our journey, it might get used to collect up everything from the car, water bottles, rubbish, toys, etc, to carry easily into the house so the car doesn’t stay a mess. It’s much easier to carry one bucket with everything in and have your other hand free to deal with the kids.

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