I do have a wife, not planning on more kids. I'm a bit of a car nerd and have a bunch of older cars I maintain myself- including several that fit the whole family- all of them together costing less than a newer economy car. There are plenty of large cars that are still fun to drive. A Porsche Cayenne/VW Touareg/Audi Q7 can tow as much as a full sized truck, seat 5 in comfort, offroad as well as almost anything, and post sports car worthy track lap times- and you can get a nice one for 5-10 grand on Craigslist nowadays.

There are some fun weird vans. I've always loved the Toyota HiAce, Mitsubishi Delica, and other strange Japanese minvans with weird features like built in karaoke machines, beverage coolers, tiny diesel engines, and real truck 4x4 systems. Also love the old VW vanagons.

They used to run (tongue in cheek) ads for the Boxster with the slogan "The more kids you have, the more practical it becomes" and that it fits "Two child seats. Up front." There's some truth to that- if you have a large family you will likely have multiple cars, it can still make sense for one of them to just take two people for 1 on 1 activities.

I tow with my mk4 tdi all the time, it’s incredibly handy. A lot of towing is bulky stuff that’s not necessarily heavy. There’s still a time and place for a truck, or a full-size truck, but not for everyone.

Haha... weirdly, I've also done a ton of towing with MKIV ALH TDIs. They're absolutely excellent vehicles for towing, and hardly use any fuel while doing so. Sometimes it gets a lot of unwanted attention - especially at a boat ramp, because Americans don't expect cars to be able to tow like that.

When I was in Ireland for work, I saw that a huge fraction of the farmers use MKIV TDIs for their farm work vehicles- they're all over the place pulling huge trailers full of livestock and hay, and still using half the fuel of most cars that are unloaded.