There comes an inevitable point in a road trip when you feel the need to shut the drive down for the night and get some rest. Most people do the cushy thing and get a hotel room, but if you’re a cheapskate like me, you’ll find a rest stop and lie down in your car.
I’ve noticed that some folks take this pretty seriously. If you hang around a rest stop long enough, you’ll find hotshot drivers with beds in the backs of their crew cab heavy-duty pickups. I’ve also seen families in minivans with curtains, string lights, and most of the bits you’d find in a camper van.
I’m not like that. I pack extremely lightly for a trip, so the only sleeping gear I bring is a pillow and a blanket. The vehicle’s seats function as my bed. This had led to both great and horrible sleeping experiences on the road.
The worst sleeping experience I’ve had is, without a doubt, the Scion iQ.
The iQ has a couple of problems working against it. The car is too small to actually lie down in, but that’s not surprising because, well, it’s super tiny. The little Scion makes up for it with front seats that recline pretty far back. However, these seats are about as comfortable as the ones you’ll find in a city bus. The only times I ever catch anything resembling sleep in the iQ is when I’m a drunk passenger.
Weirdly, this isn’t an issue for the Smart Fortwo (below), because the Smart has a fold-flat passenger seat. If you’re traveling solo, bring a couple of pillows, a yoga mat, and a blanket, and you should be able to achieve something resembling okay-ish sleep. Or, bring a tiny inflatable mattress and have surprisingly decent sleep.
I’m usually driving a big truck of some kind when I pick up a car from across the country, so I typically just lie down in the back seat with a pillow and blanket and achieve a decent night’s sleep.
I expected the 2025 Ford F-250 Super Duty XL regular cab loaner that I have right now to be no different.
It doesn’t have a back seat, but it does have a 40/20/40 bench seat that looks like it could be a decent bed. Unfortunately, the center part of the bench folds, but it does not recline. It also doesn’t move back. So, if the center of the bench is in the way, there’s not much you can do about it. This makes the regular cab F-250 one of my least pleasurable sleeping experiences.
My favorite road trip sleeping experience yet was in the 2025 Ford F-350 Super Duty Platinum Plus. Ford went through a lot of work to make its flagship Super Duty as comfortable as a luxury car. The F-350’s seats do an amazing job of soaking up huge bumps. A byproduct of this is that the rear seat is almost as comfortable as the bed I have at home.
I was able to get a full eight hours of sleep in the back of the F-350, and I felt as refreshed as I would have sleeping at home. That was with nothing more than using my clothes as a pillow and a truck stop blanket.
Here’s where I turn things over to you: What car has the best seats for snoozing? For the purposes of this exercise, the cargo areas of vans and wagons don’t count, we’re strictly talking seat-sleeping. Recline and relax, stretch out across the rear bench … what cars are most comfy for a night?
Went on a work trip recently and was picked up by a G90 LWB. It was a short ride, but felt like it would be nice on a long trip.
Surprised nobody has mentioned a Ram 2500 with the Mega Cab…
I have found the rear reclining buckets in a Buick Enclave work well for a few hours. Although I think the 2011 was more comfortable than the 2019. Not a full night, haven’t tried.
In many long overnight drives if a Motel spring matress in good A/C that’s not too loud is a 7 out of 10 comfort level:
Most comfortable to sleep in: ’96 Ram 2500 with cloth interior rear bench. Comfort level: 6/10
Most comfortable driver seat for sleep: ’15 BRZ. Comfort level: 5/10
Most comfortable car sleep including wagons: ’97 Stagea with weighted blanket “futon” in the wagon with a pillow. Comfort level: 8/10. Better than a cheap motel, imo.
The only car I’ve ever camped overnight in was a Honda Insight, and it does have seats that very intentionally fold flat into two twin beds. Unfortunately, without an extra mattress pad on top, the contours of the seats laid flat make for a very bumpy bed, especially if you’re a side sleeper. Not the worst sleep I’ve gotten, but considered I slept far better on a cot in a tent afterwards, that should tell you something.
I’m sure it would have been fine with an inflatable or foam pad though.
The one that is parked in the parking lot of a decent hotel – I am NOT sleeping in a car at my age. For napping while somebody else is driving, any seat that is comfortable in the first place. Which for me means French, German, or Swedish, in that order.
This. I’ve reached the point (and income) in my life where I’m not doing that stuff anymore.
I reached it a good 30 years ago. My idea of “camping” is slow room service.
I went camping last weekend for the first time in years. Had a great time but sleeping was not as easy as I remember it.
I tent camped a couple times as a kid. That was waaaaay more than enough, zero interest in reliving the experience in any way. I hated doing it then, and I can only imagine how much I would hate it as a spoiled 56yo.
Heh. The late great southern comedian Jerry Clower, who was an avid outdoorsman, hunter, and fisherman, was once asked if his wife ever joined him in his outdoor exploits. He laughed and said he tried to get her to go camping with him once, and she crossed her arms and said, “The mortgage payments on this house are too expensive for me to go sleep on the riverbank.”
See also: Ron White on why he doesn’t go hunting. It’s got nothing to do with animal rights or morality of any kind, “it’s just cold, and it’s dark, and it’s early, and I don’t wanna go.”
Ron White also said the best way to get a deer was with a VAN. With the horn blooowin’. 🙂
Big fan of both of them.
One of my favorite Jerry Clower bits that mentions an automobile was when he told the story of appearing on the David Frost show, where the topic was “the youth of today.” He was asked whether he thought kids these days were better or worse than when he was growing up, and he said they were much better, and that his son Ray was a much better boy at 17 than he was. He said when he was that age, and if, like his son Ray, “I’d’a had me one’a them LeSabre Buicks? Not only would I have stole them watermelons, I’d’a got away with ’em!”
He was apparently both a railfan and a Buick man – he once rhapsodized about the Panama Limited passenger train that served his hometown as a boy, and how fast it was and what a treat it was to get to ride it, and how he had bought a new Buick “just because it said ‘Limited’ on the back. If it had said ‘Panama’ on the side, I’d’a bought two of ’em.”
Agreed. Same logic for getting stuck overnight at an airport: I’m not camping out in some terminal gate seating, I’m getting a hotel. I don’t care if the rates are super inflated, I need a shower and a bed, though a capsule hotel inside the airport would be totally fine if it had shower facilities.
Oh yes. I spent the night in an airport terminal once as a penniless student in Europe. Vienna in 1992 on my way home from a summer in Budapest. Nope, never, ever, ever again.
My father and I (as a child) overnighted in our 1962 and 1965 Ramblers, whose seats folded down into a full size bed.
For an adult, the back seats of a Toyota Century or Nissan President
For an infant or toddler, the original Foat Panda’s back seat can be configured as a small hammock
You want a solid flat bench seat, not a split. Then you can lay down across it without getting poked by anything. My 4 door nova was great for this.
Stickshifts and safety belts, bucket seats have all got to go…
VW Golfs rule the night, just fold down the back seats, push the fronts forward, and lay out your sleeping pad, bag, and pillow. And for tall folks, they come in wagons and for us serious cheapskates, TDIs too!
I believe every 90’s kid knows. A Dodge Caravan with the seats replaced with bean bags. Along with the 8 inch TV/VCR combo playing Last Crusade.
My old Explorer had a cargo area that roughly matched the size of a twin bed if you put the seats flat. I used to back my old Explorer up to a nice view, open the liftgate and study in the back sometimes between work and night classes.
Post WW2 Nash had seats that fold flat into a bed.
Not only that, Nash had official pads and blankets for sleeping on the fold flat seats
Not the seats, pickup beds that are 6ft long and a “camper” top, throw a twin mattress between the wheel wells, sheets, pillows, blankets, etc. and you got a positively cozy place to sleep anywhere but in hot weather.
I did this in High School and would take lunchtime naps, sleep off parties and get togethers with friends, etc.
If you’re talking about actually sleeping in the seats — Specifically, pulling into a rest stop and reclining the seat back to zonk out for a bit — Any ’03-’06 GMT800 platform truck (Silverado/Sierra/Tahoe/Suburban/Escalade) is the easy answer. And if you’ve got an SUV with middle-row captain’s chairs, those recline too! Phenomenally comfortable and highly adjustable seats that are very easy to sleep in if need be.
If you’re talking about seats that fold flat to make a sleeping area, our VW Alltrack works great for that as well. My wife and I made a cannonball run from Tulsa to Portland, ME a couple years back for a Death Cab/Postal Service show, and slept in the back 2x on the way up and back. We had a foam pad, a double-wide Kelty bag, and pillows, and it was totally comfortable in a small-footprint package getting 30+ mpg on the highway.
Oh, and my ’79 Westfalia has actual fold-out beds, but that’s probably cheating.
I have 2nd gen JDM Mitsubishi RVR (nee Expo LRV in our markets for the 1st gen). The rear bench is on sliders to move fore and aft, and fold flat, and are designed to meet up with front seats folded flat for a sleeping platform. Even without doing that, you can get the rear seats flat with plenty of leg room and still get cozy.
A Renault 16 TS.
All 16’s play seat games, the TS is the sportier version.
Some explanation of the seating and then you might understand.
Since I got no response, I thought they don’t know the 16.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veVTqchJ_5A
If I have to be sleeping on a seat, I don’t want to be jamming myself onto a bench of some sort. I’d rather be in a seat itself if I’m sleeping in a car. In general, I’ve never been able to get comfortable laying flat on lumpy/bumpy car benches.
Most minivan 2nd row captains chairs are probably going to be the best choice. I won’t include my van’s stow n’ go seats in that, as they’re not exactly the most comfortable seats on the planet. So I’m going to go with the second row of the Honda Odyssey. Those seats are supremely comfortable (especially the leather ones from about 5-10 years ago), they’re reclinable of course, and they have well positioned, adjustable arm rests.
If not the van, I’m going with the 2001 Volvo V70 Cross Country. Those seats fucking rule, as most Volvo seats do, but this era of Volvo still had seats that were both insanely comfortable, but also less aggressively shaped/bolstered than in modern Volvos.
Probably a 2000 Ford Explorer… A friend in college was coming home from school one night and fell asleep while driving. He woke up the next morning about half a mile deep into a cornfield bottomed out in a mud pit and out of gas.
1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager LE. Took many naps in the third row on long-haul family trips back in the day.
Bonus points if it has wood grain (ours did).
The first-generation Honda CR-V, and the only thing that comes close is the Honda Element. Both have seats that fold flat backwards to become a bed. No extra cushions needed, and you can stretch from head to toe without laying any part of your body on a non-cushioned surface.
My wife and I took her CR-V camping and I woke up the next morning without a single point of pain on my body. Our shoulders, hips, lower backs, knees, necks, everything felt good in the morning, and the cigarette lighter port in the trunk section made for easy access to phone charging without reaching down to the dashboard.
Honda has a number of older models that let you fold the front and rear seats back into one large bed area. The 1st and 2nd gen CRV and the Element did this, possibly some years of the Fit. The Chevy Astro van could fold the second and third rows flat together as well.
The Fit seats did not. But the back seats folded to a flat cargo floor, which was large enough for an air mattress or cushion. It was great for drive-in movies!
They do! At least, on my 2015 Fit EX-L they do! I live near Detroit but am from Minnesota, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how comfortable that setup was while napping on my home from a family visit.
Its the LX700h Ultra Luxury.
The rear PS seat fully reclines and automatically folds the front seat forward and deploys a footrest. Hybrid power allows you to keep the AC and massage function on while you nap and its bank vault quiet in there. I can’t imagine a nicer place to rest from the factory except for maybe another setup like this from another manufacture that could possible do the same thing a little better.
https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PR_00392.jpg
Can personally vouch for these seats.
The rear seat in a older W116 long wheel base Mercedes (like a 450SEL). The seat is huge, flat, and has the same steel spring firmness from side to side. The rear seat area itself is gigantic, so you don’t feel cramped, and there is plenty of space for things like your phone. And it is very solid and well sealed – you feel safe and removed from the noise and weather outside.
I am completely incapable of sleeping in a moving vehicle of any kind, including planes. I can try, and maybe briefly doze for literally a couple minutes, but always end up spending 99% of my time awake. It’s why I almost always drive on trips, I can’t sleep or relax so may as well drive.
The last time I tried sleeping in the car was a five hour trip to the airport in an 04 Taurus driven by my now ex’s mom. It was past midnight, and she’s watching Spanish novellas on her phone while driving, fluctuating between 50 and 75+ mph and weaving all over the road. I decided to take over, and she yanked the wheel and came to an abrupt halt on the shoulder. I drove the rest of the way. To make it worse, I should note I despise those Tauruses and hated every second behind the wheel of one. And the backseat felt like a collapsed sofa.