As you have probably surmised, we travel with our dogs…a lot. So adapting a new vehicle to our needs, that one in particular, was very important. We used to travel with them in our previous car, a Prius. They basically had a couple of beds in the back seat and that was the extent of our adaptation.
The new car, this Corolla Cross hybrid, we had to really think about what would work best. As well as taking the dogs needs (and ours by extension) into account, we also needed to protect the cloth interior seats that come with this model of Cross. So we knew we needed something more than a couple of small dog beds.
And Kimberly found it.
I call the doggie living room. It’s basically converted the back seat into a space for our dogs. It’s waterproof so it protects the cloth seats and, more importantly, it gives our girls a very nice play to be. We have tons of room for two dog beds, a pillow and lots of toys and bones. Snow gets car sick, a lot (which is weird because she loves to go for rides). So the protection was an absolute necessity. They also can’t pull threadds from the cloth seats with their cloths because of the hard floor on it and the vertical seat protection.
The K9 Cruiser (what the seller calls this) has a hard bottom, so we’ve extended the room they have in the back seat (this is whay I refer to it as their living room). They have extra space that would have been the gap between the seats because of the hard floor of the K9 Cruiser. We also can use the space under the floor of the K9 Cruiser, behind the front the seats, for storage now. Storage which the girls can’t get to.
We bought this from PetsVetSupply.com and received nothing in return (we didn’t ask for anything). We recommend them because we love product so much.
The change in their behavior, having this space, was remarkable. They stopped wanting to crawl into the front seats to be with us (as much, not completely). The “room living” also comes with a net divider which we can zip making it impossible them to get to the front. It also protects the vertical portions of the both the front and back seats as well as gives us some pockets for storage. The storage pockets are awesome (as we’ve mentioned, storage in the Cross is, well, challenging). By luck or design, it even allows thge rear the seat vent to work as it should so they have working HVAC in their living space.
Given their new living space they seem to enjoy trips much more and are definitely more relaxed while in the car. Since we take long trips this is important to us as anxiety about the dogs while driving used to be a constant pressure on us. Snow is getting much less often which is also a huge relief (we’ve taken other measure as well to help this).
Yes, we have given up our back seat for our dogs. For us, that’s not a problem. We seldom, if ever, have passengers that aren’t our dogs and we still have the rear hatch area for groceries and whatever else we bring.
I cannot say enough good things about this product. It has made our lives better. It has made our dogs lives better and now, traveling with the girls is even more fun.
