It’s not. But 3 across is obviously important because your vehicle selection goes down significantly once you need to expand to a third row to grow your capacity.
I can say from experience that vehicle selection goes down much more once you need to expand to a fifth row. There were just two choices, one from Ford and one from GM.
Fitting three car seats across is still difficult, despite enough car width to have a 4-wide bench in the rear. Putting car seats in the back rows makes them hard to get to, so they should go in the second row or in the third row seat nearest the door. That gives reasonably easy room for 3, but some states would have had me needing 5.
The title/registration stuff does in fact say "bus", but I wouldn't call it that. It's just an extended body van. I get mildly accusatory questions when registering it for non-commercial use and when I go places that have per car or per family payment.
I got the E350. It holds 15 people including the driver, which leaves me just one empty seat when I drive my whole family. Seating is 2-3-3-3-4 from front to back, with an aisle along the right side.
In Europe you would in fact have to have a bus driving license (D or D1) for that kind of vehicle since it can transport more than 8+1 [passengers+driver] (and it most likely also goes beyond the maximum authorized mass of 3500 kg for the B license).
Fun fact, my mom was the 15th child of 16. My only sister and I worked it out, our grandma was basically pregnant 12 years of her life if it would have been back to back and exactly 9 months each child.
So far nobody has been able to beat my late grandma for children count. Also soup, she made the best soup around.
Just thought I’d throw that one out there. They were spaced out a fair amount though so not like she needed to bus all 16 around at the same time. By the time 16 was not in the oven the first few were already out of the house.
I meant that's cool, but I'd argue that's the nichest of niche uses I've ever seen. And as someone else already said, in Europe you would actually need a full D class licence to drive this in the first place, so you might as well get something like a modified Mercedes Sprinter with 12-15 seats.
A few years back we got (with a bit of squeezing) three broad-shouldered adults into the back of a friend's Skoda Fabia hatchback [0]. Bit uncomfortable but we fit.
