Born Weird

If you haven’t been paying attention to me on Facebook or Twitter, you may not know that I (well, we) recently got a new car.

Until just a few days ago, my wife and I shared a 2005 Toyota Prius. The Prius is a great car: we never had any real problems with it, it got great gas mileage, the back hatch was very useful, etc. It had about 78,000 miles on it and was running great. We didn’t really need a new car.

But life is funny sometimes. My wife just spent about six weeks on crutches (she’s still using one occasionally) and both my parents came down from Minnesota to help out with the baby while Martha was laid up. And we recently upgraded from an infant car seat to a larger “convertible” car seat.

These various things (coupled with a few bizarre incidents where the Prius wouldn’t start for a little while) really got me thinking about our long-term vehicle needs. Sure our current car was doing fine, but as the baby gets bigger (and perhaps we have another someday) and our parents get older, interior space and in/egress issues will become more and more important.

It seemed to me like sometime in the next few years we’d need to upgrade from the Prius to something larger, ideally something with a third row of seats. After doing some research it seemed like the RAV4 was an imperfect but pretty good option… just a little too expensive.

Enter the “Toyotathon of Death” in February, followed by crazy good incentives from Toyota in March: zero percent APR for 60 months, plus two years free regular maintenance for returning Toyota customers. Suddenly, it seemed like maybe it was a good time to upgrade.

Long story short: we drove one, thought about it, talked it over, and eventually decided to get one. Here it is:

For those of you who want to know specifics, it’s a 4WD Base V6 with the extra value package (DRLs, roof rails, privacy glass), third row seat, 17″ alloy wheels and tow prep package. I could have done without the 4WD, alloy wheels or tow prep, but this is the only configuration available with a third-row seat anywhere remotely near the Albuquerque area.

With the Prius tradein and a few grand down, we were able to keep the amount financed to about $16k, leading to a pretty affordable monthly payment for a vehicle that goes 0-60 in under seven seconds and holds up to seven passengers (though the ones in the very back need to be small). Check out this PDF overview of specs and test results from a recent Car & Driver comparison of eight CUVs to see how well the RAV4 stacks up to the competition (personally I think it’s obviously superior).

I do miss several things about the Prius (fuel economy, steering-wheel audio controls, never actually taking the key out of my pocket) but the usefulness of the space the RAV4 provides is really, really nice and I’m quite happy with the purchase. It’s fast, spacious, reasonably fuel-efficient considering, and totally interest-free. With any luck, it’ll be our family car for a long, long time.