My
wife and I currently have two wonderful cars that precisely fit our
needs.
The
newer is the one that I drive. It is a comically-small car, called a
Scion IQ. It has a slightly offset seating arrangement that makes it
impractical for more than three persons. There are two back seats,
but the one behind the driver has no leg space at all. I kid could
squeeze in, but not for a long ride.
This
doesn't matter, as the back seats were folded away the day we got the
car home, and they haven't been out since. I've only ever had one
passenger.
It
is my zip around car, and the one I take on the half-hour drive to
Jiu-Jitsu. It has plenty of room for that kind of thing, and is
ridiculously economical on gas.
It
is currently 4 years old.
The
one Helen drives is normal-sized. It is a Toyota Prius. It is even
more economical than my tiny Scion.
It's
the one we use for grocery runs, and Helen regularly hauls around
tons of musical instruments and friends.
It
is 8 years old.
Helen
likes to run cars until they die of old age. I prefer getting rid of
them at the ten-year mark, before they become big-ticket-repair
prone, and might let you down at an inopportune moment.
This
means we will need to think about replacing the Prius in 2 years.
There
is really not much question as to what kind of car we'll get. We both
love our current Prius so much, that it will be a Prius again. The
question is, what size of Prius.
Toyota
currently makes the standard model, a slightly-larger one, and a
littler one as well.
We've
looked at them all, and neither of us thinks we need the large model.
That narrows the field to 2 choices.
We
really like our full-sized model. We often travel with it pretty much
fully packed. The standard has 21.6 cubic feet of cargo room, as
opposed to 17.1 cubic feet in the small model. The price difference
is $26000 against $22000.
This
all means that unless things change radically in the next couple of
years, our 2018 new car will be a Prius, standard-sized.
The
Scion won't be up for replacement until 4 years after that, in 2022.
That's
really far enough away that predictions are much harder to make.
I
would guess that we'll be looking closely at a small-model Prius, but
electric cars are popping out all over.
By
2022, it may be possible to get some sort of vehicle that functions
well in a self-driving fashion, or at least has features that lean
that way; lane assist, radar cruise control, and who knows what else.
I
find it funny that a lot of people dread the arrival of self-driving
cars. For me, they can't get here soon enough.
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