My wife is expecting our first child, and currently drives round in an atrocious 1.2 '99 Corsa, which she professes to really like for some unfathomable reason. I have to drive it from time to time, and it's a horrible experience. Every journey in it is a chore, while in my car it is a pleasure.
So (and it's only idle speculation at the moment I'm afraid, she might decide not to change at all) the idea for this thread is to come up with replacement motors to suggest to her.
She certainly wants rear doors - that is the entire justification for a possible changeover. Baby in rear-facing chair in back of 3-door car seems like a recipe for frustration.
We have dogs - but they're very small, Jack Russells - so a 5-door seems to be indicated. But perhaps a saloon might work, if there isn't a bulkhead aft of the passenger cell, and it has split-fold rear seats? Not sure about that one...
I would like the car to be a bit different (although if all the other criteria mean that the answer has to be 'Golf' or 'Focus', I'll consider changing that one I suppose), 'nice', pleasant to drive (not only on my own behalf, I'd like my wife to see how much better she could aspire to than that soul-sapping Corsa!).
Mrs Bazza would probably like the car to be not too much bigger than a Corsa. But I intend to talk her into driving my car a bit in the near future, and see if I can talk her out of that one (reason for that will become clear when you see what stuff I've thought about so far!) I think we should stick with manual. She hasn't been driving all that long, so good to avoid losing the skill of gear changing yourself.
Oh, and price range. I guess £5k maybe? I'm sure we'd be perfectly happy to pay less if something was suggested though. I'm a very big fan of getting a hell of a lot of car for your money by buying something which was 'executive' when new, and has depreciated massively.
I had an idle flick through Autotrader earlier with a price and distance limit from us, and here's what I came up with as potentially desireable (but not necessarily at all practical) answers:
Fiat Bravo (new shape)
Volvo S40 (probably too big though)
Saab 9-3 (as above)
Lexus IS200 (as above)
Fiat Grande Punto (maybe a bit too common, but lovely styling for a small car)
Any thoughts, comments or put downs at my ridiculous plans for a baby-wagon much appreciated!
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