Our New Ride

The time finally came to retire the Subaru (190K miles), and find a suitable replacement. With another baby on the way, we needed something that was safer, worked better with carseats, got excellent gas mileage, and had enough space. With the price of fuel these days (and most likely only to go up), I set a fuel economy requirement of at least 30 mpg. This ruled out a lot of cars. And when you factor in the space requirement, there were really only two options: the Volkswagen Sportwagen TDI (diesel) and the Toyota Prius. Still clinging to my old school car roots, I had a hard time accepting the space age Prius. The more conventional nature of the Sportwagen and the spirited diesel engine (still capable of close to 40+ mpg hwy) were more to our liking.

So meet the newest member of the family...



Nothing too special about the interior, but it does have a rugged, Teutonic feel unlike a lot of Japanese cars that feel more spacey and plastic.


This spacious cargo area plus the panoramic sunroof sold Connie on the car. It'll make roadtrips and camping excursions so much easier especially when we have two rugrats in tow.


And the most important thing was the fitting of carseats. The LATCH system makes it so much easier than using the seatbelts as in the old Subaru, and there's plenty of space for the infant carseat as well. I do look forward to the time when we won't need carseats, but that's many years down the road.


I ended up purchasing the car from Sunnyvale VW up near SF. Turns out that they offered the best deal by far, and even paid for my plane ticket to fly up there. The drive back was a good time to get to know the car. I even averaged 39 mpg, and drove the entire distance to San Diego on one tank of diesel! Once the car's fully broken in and I can drive in a more economical fashion, it should be no problem to see well over 40 mpg on highway trips.