I’ve seen rumors in the past of tickets given for expired seats, not necessarily in Indiana. Can’t corroborate any of them. Enough to leave a little cloud of doubt over the matter I guess.
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This topic is something I would have never considered and one of the reasons this forum is fantastic.
Our 5th is due in 3 weeks and we have an Odyssey. We’ll have 3 in the back seats with 3 across car seats. Tight. If we go for number 6, passenger van it is.
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A random question that occurs to me.
We have an 06 Sienna. Since my son was born last week, we have moved my two daughters to the back seat, and I could only find latches for 2 car seats in the back. Do boosters have to be strapped in or not? Or is there actually a third set of latches that I missed? @danielmeyer?
I’m a little bummed that the van seems to have less capacity than I thought.
Often there are more seatbelts than LATCH system connections, assuming that’s what you’re talking about. But seatbelts are perfectly acceptable, though often harder to use, to lock a car seat or booster in place. There are three seatbelts back there, at least. As the kids get older, you will probably want boosters that don’t lock in place but that they sit on and buckle the normal seatbelt over themselves.
Edit to add: Source: I have an '06 Sienna. 
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We rejoiced when our oldest three all hit the booster stage. So much easier. Having two more though, we were trying to squeeze three boosters in the back seat. That proved challenging. We found a few narrow boosters that made it possible (that was a few years ago, there’s probably more options now):
The bubble bum was our favorite. We still keep two in my truck just in case.
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Another datapoint: Friends/neighbors had their 5th last year and settled on a Hyundai H-1 9 seater. Seems to work for them.
Pretty sure that’s exactly the type of van that I mentioned above that you can’t buy in the USA. 
Or a Ford Explorer or Honda Pilot with third seat may work.
Most people have a hard time separating individual concerns from population-level concerns. Individual-level concerns (like kids dying on our highways) make sob stories and demands that someone “do something!” And often the “something” in question is effective. There is no doubt that a kid riding down the highway in his 2020-model car seat is safer than his 1970 counterpart napping on the rear deck lid of the sedan.
But then we compare 1970-era fertility statistics to 2020-era fertility statistics and we all scratch our heads: it is a puzzlement.
I second this. Extremely useful for getting a kids into tight spaces.
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And Doug Ummel got one too…albeit it a few years ago. =-)
Good to know…
We ultimately settled on a Sienna instead of a caravan and we like it very much. I will keep what you said in mind about the console seat…
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Got the Bubble Gum yesterday. So good. Kids love it.
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Freakonomics latest episode is on this. It is an excellent podcast. Raises questions of the ethics of car seat manufacturers, governmental lapses, and the falling birth rate. Links many things to love of money (they don’t quite say it this way), feminism, and birth control.
Countless questions are raised in my mind from it and I’m having a hard getting them onto computer screen.
Give it a listen: How much do we really care about children?
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