New Family Car · 1 April 2009, 08:10 by trickykid
So back in February we bought a new family car. The lease on my 4 year old Mazda 3 was up in March and I didn’t want to keep it (hence the reason I leased to get a lower monthly payment, plus at the time my work was only a mile away so I knew I’d never go over the mileage limit.)
Having two kids now, we needed a little more room as the wife was toting the kids around in her 2003 Mazda Protege which was planned to pay off by this June but instead we just paid it off a week before buying the new Subaru Forester.
Why’d we go with a Subaru? Well, not because it was Motor Trends SUV of the year because we’re actually against SUV’s. It’s not really an SUV to us. Most don’t realize it but the engine sits lower so the center of gravity is lower. It’s almost like a cross between a Wagon and SUV, bigger than a wagon but not technically an SUV, even though they call it one. Most insurance companies don’t consider it an SUV. Our insurance for the new car only bumped us up an extra 10 dollars a month.
Safety was probably the number one reason we went with it along with reliability. Sure finding a mechanic to do the maintenance might be a drag but we plan to just use the dealership services when the time arises.
It rides good, its comfortable and the wife enjoys having the iPod interface. We opted to go with it over satellite radio connection. For some odd reason you can only have one of the two with the stereo they are equipped with. We almost went to the XT model in order to have GPS Navigation but all these models were standard with leather seating, which neither of us wanted and justifying a 3000k upgrade just for that was out of the question. We’ll just likely get a portable GPS eventually that mounts in the car which is more useful anyways since you can take it where ever you go.
Overall the car has been great. No long trips yet but anticipating driving this thing on a nice vacation in the coming months or years hopefully.
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