The Venture offers generous head room and elbow room no matter which seat you're in. A height-adjustment lever really aids comfort on long trips as you can change your driving position without getting too close or too far from the steering wheel. The fore and aft range of the driver's seat is long enough for drivers over six-and-a-half feet tall. The front seats hold you securely with large side bolsters on the backs of the seats. The seating surface is relatively flat, which makes getting in and out easy, but encourages you to move around on long trips.The Venture's base model seats are benches in the second and third rows, and the benches have split folding backs. That makes them handy for carrying two-by-fours as well as a couple of rear-seat passengers at the same time. But the seats are relatively heavy to remove and replace, should you need more space for grandfather clocks or dog cages. More convenient are the single bucket seats that you can get with the pricier LS model. These buckets weight just 38 pounds, which we find light enough that plucking them out and leaving them in the garage is not a painful act. You can get five of these buckets in the rear of your LS model. The backs of the buckets fold flat and compact, and have indentations so cups won't slide off on the road. Folded flat, the bucket seats are also easier to stash on your garage shelves than the heavy bench seats. The Venture stays abreast of more recently designed minivans with lots of cupholders and bins for passengers to store stuff. The Warner Brothers Edition has leather seats standard, which we find are easier to keep clean than cloth seats, especially if you're carrying a large brood of sloppy youngsters. In the Warner Brothers Edition, the entertainment system features six rear headphone jacks, so all of the rear-seaters can be engaged without disturbing the driver too much. Like the systems in the Pontiac and Oldsmobile, the viewing screen is a 5.6-inch diagonal flat panel that folds down from the ceiling behind the driver and front passenger, and faces the rear-seaters. The success of this system is its integration and durability. Aftermarket systems we've sampled tend to rattle and shake more, and are prone to interference from other electronics in the vehicle. Optional in the LS are captain's chairs, high-backed bucket seats with armrests. They may be more comfortable for adults, but the versions we've used before would not recline fully unless they were moved all the way forward. Your legs are already a bit crowded in the second row of the Venture, even in the long-wheelbase versions. The long vans add most of their extra space in the cargo area. The optional CD player on some models is mounted inconveniently low in the center console, a long reach from the driver. The videotape player is mounted near the floor, too. Our test car was an LT model, on the long wheelbase. We decided to put its standard load-leveling suspension to task, and hauled a 450-pound motorcycle in the rear for a ride several states away. In the long van, the full-size bike fit with room to spare, though we had to compress the front fork to get it through the van's rear hatchback. The seat mounting latch bars in the floor made perfect tie-down points.
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