Will a 3/4 double bass fit into a Bmw 4 series gran coupe?

July 26, 2016 4:33 AM

The title says it all - I guess it's a very niche problem and maybe someone has advice on how to do this?
posted by freddymetz to Travel & Transportation (10 answers total)

No. I'd recommend a rental.
posted by arnicae at 4:37 AM on July 26, 2016

I don't know about the BMW specifically, but I have rode with a 3/4 double bass in a two door Toyota Tercel innumerable times, so I am more optimistic. This worked by putting the front passenger seat all the way back and putting the bass in neck first at an angle, with the neck between the seats. YMMV.
posted by jamaal at 5:08 AM on July 26, 2016

Yes, bass riding shotgun in a sedan with the front seat fully reclined is very doable. In my experience the limiting factor is the front passenger door -- how far does it open (you need almost 90 degrees) and is the door hole large enough to maneuver the bass into position? A door that doesn't open to almost perpendicular makes it very tough to get the bass in and out of the front seat.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:17 AM on July 26, 2016

Being in many orchestras, I remember one particular bass player who could get his full-size double-bass into pretty much anything.

So, unless someone here has literally put the same instrument into the same car, no one else can answer this for you. You will just have to try it yourself. If that is too risky, then a rental it is.
posted by TinWhistle at 7:09 AM on July 26, 2016

I feel like there's context here I don't get. Is someone picking you up somewhere, or are you considering a BMW and wonder if your instrument will fit in it?
posted by uberchet at 7:17 AM on July 26, 2016

If I could, I would bring my bass to a BMW dealer and try it.
posted by AugustWest at 7:25 AM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

It looks like the rear seats all fold down- just google for images- so I would be pretty optimistic about this. It's hard to know without actually doing it, however, but in my extensive experience helping my students stuff bases into sedans and God knows what else it's a rare car you can't work with at all.

Now, getting a bass plus the driver plus another passenger is going to be a whole different ball game and is far less guaranteed, so knowing your specific use case here would be helpful.
posted by charmedimsure at 7:26 AM on July 26, 2016

My son plays bass and is the current owner of a 3/4 size. We've bought two new cars during the time he's had the bass, and both times we test drove cars home to see if the bass would fit.

It most definitely does not fit in a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry. The problem isn't necessarily that the front passenger seats didn't recline back far enough, it's that the scroll would literally be touching the 'ceiling' in the cars and he was not at all convinced that the neck wouldn't break if he hit an especially large pothole or got in a fender-bender. It wasn't worth the potential risk of breaking his multiple-thousands of dollars instrument.

And forget going through the trunk. The bridge could never make it past the part where the trunk meets the back seats (even with the seats folded down).

You can look up the dimensions of an Accord and a Camry and see how they compare to the BMW. Unless the BMW has significantly different dimensions, I doubt it's going to work.
posted by cooker girl at 8:09 AM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

To counter the above: I am an orchestra teacher and I drove a Camry sedan for years transporting 3/4 basses. I couldn't always do it with a passenger because I had to angle the neck into the passenger seat and feed the bass through the trunk with one of my more weirdly-shaped instruments, but it was doable (not *pleasant*- that's why my new car is a Forester). Here's a video of the standard way that works for most basses if you are doing for a kid's instrument never having never done it before. Sometimes I have had to mess with the driver seat position or take off the headrest temporarily to get it to swing around the right way.

Most cars are doable for a one-off with no passenger; whether it's something you'd want to do every day is another matter and there's no guarantee without trying it out.
posted by charmedimsure at 11:11 AM on July 26, 2016

I've fit a 3/4 bass in a VW beetle (the old air-cooled kind), although there's no room for a passenger as well. I did it by folding down the back seat and moving the front passenger seat all the way up and tilting it forward, then angle the instrument in body-first through the passenger door with the neck resting on the back and headrest of the front passenger seat. So my guess is that it could be done in an average 4-seat coupe with the rear seat folded down.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:10 PM on July 26, 2016