I was very proud of the fact that we managed to live our suburban lives with only one car, but today we broke down and bought a second car. Our first was becoming increasingly unreliable, and after the car had a cooling-system malfunction and my husband and the girls were stranded we decided that we needed to buy a second car. Our first will now be the "station car," the car my husband drives to the train station on days when he doesn't walk there. If we put 1,000 miles on it in the next year, I'll be amazed.
Our starting criteria for buying the new car were simple:
1. Seats 5.
2. Has high fuel economy.
3. Ideally under $30,000.
I desperately wanted a Prius, but it's too small for us (we rented one while on vacation and loved it, but it was cramped with two gigantic car seats in the back; plus we needed room for our dog). Two sites were infinitely helpful in our search: MyProductAdvisor.com (which asks you a series of questions, then recommends cars that meet your criteria) and Edmunds.com (which gives you all sorts of technical information, reviews, pricing information, and advice). We narrowed our list to four cars that we test-drove, the Subaru Outback, Subaru Forrester, Saturn Vue Hybrid, and Honda CR-V. And today we bought (drum roll, please!) the CR-V.
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