That headline is only the second 1980s musical reference of the day, which might point to a lack of sleep on the part of your author. Blame a raging sinus infection, or perhaps exposure to a heavy Twitter conversation that began yesterday and continues into today.
I’m a passive observer in all of this, as Twitter’s toxicity makes Love Canal look like a lush Koi pond. Engage at your peril. And yet an element of the back-and-forth that rages online in the center of the Canadian universe (Toronto) is something frequently mentioned in far calmer TTAC chatroom discussions.
How much car is too much car?
And, does it matter if you buy to cover all the bases?
It all started after Toronto-based journalist Matt Gurney, suburban owner of a Mazda CX-5 (an excellent choice for those going the crossover route, by the way) replied to a tweet by Angie Schmitt, a writer at Streetsblog USA (“Daily news about the fight for sustainable transportation and livable communities,” per its Facebook page).
See the initial interaction here:
This is true as far as it goes, but as someone who drives a (light) SUV — technically a “compact crossover” — and has two kids, the appeal of the SUV isn’t the passenger capacity, but the cargo capacity. My CX-5 has just less than double the cargo capacity of my last sedan. https://t.co/t6uIMhMkfy
— Matt Gurney (@mattgurney) May 6, 2019
Schmitt’s take on the current CUV/SUV trend is a familiar one. It’s something yours truly has espoused on numerous occasion, often while thinking of a large, conservative sedan.
“This whole idea that if you have kids you NEED an SUV is such garbage,” Schmitt tweeted. “The normal crossover type SUV doesn’t even seat more people than like a Prius or an Accord. Much larger average family sizes got by with regular cars and station wagons just fine in the past.”
Gurney’s tweet prompted responses from Schmitt and a legion of Twitter users on either side of the debate (and border).
Schmitt’s statement is essentially true. The crossover is a relative newcomer on the automotive scene, and the Suburbans, Broncos, Blazers, and Grand Wagoneers of my childhood were oddities, far outnumbered by Cutlass Cieras and Tempos. You can cram a lot of stuff into a compact or midsize car — even today, that statement holds true. The only caveat is that you must be willing to say “no” to your kids, and say it a lot.
Growing up, my family (two parents, two kids, sometimes a dog) made do with numerous vehicles, not one of them being a minivan or SUV. The Plymouth Reliant and Ford Escort wagons of my early years were adequate for two kids without much stuff and little involvement in team sports, but those compact wagons gave way to an ’83 Olds Cutlass Cruiser that served us for years.
Larger families had access to larger wagons, just like in earlier decades. Three-row wagons, almost all powered by a V8, riding atop full-size sedan architecture. Compared to the Caprices, Safaris, Colony Parks, and what have you, our two-row Cutlass (307 V8) wagon returned 20 mpg combined on the EPA’s generous early ’80s test cycle. My father would dispute that lofty figure. It’s no secret that older full-size sedans and wagons from the ’60s and ’70s guzzled fuel like Dean Martin on a Vegas bender.
One response to Gurney’s tweet thread came from Toronto Star columnist Shawn Micallef, co-founder of the Spacing magazine and blog network. Spacing, like Streetsblog USA, explores “public transit, urban design, public art, community planning, and sustainable development.”
How did we car pool to hockey in the neighbour’s K Car in the 80s? Did I imagine that? https://t.co/0xFtXpYTEF
— Shawn Micallef (@shawnmicallef) May 7, 2019
I’m unsure whether Micallef, like Gurney, has two kids and a spouse/partner, with both adults requiring a vehicle for different types of trips. I’m not sure how the two men’s incomes differ, though in Toronto the mantra of “just live downtown” carries with it a steep price tag. By North American standards, it’s a very expensive city in which to live.
As Gurney stated, it would take a lot of transit and bike use to recoup the roughly $600,000 difference between purchasing a family home downtown or one 30 or so miles distant, plus a compact crossover. Keep in mind we’re talking about a Mazda CX-5 here, not a Lincoln Navigator Black Label.
It’s a collision of values and reality. Living green usually means downsizing and making do with limited (or at least different) transportation options, and, depending on locale, doing it at a cost. Many of the most vocal proponents of an ultra-urban lifestyle live comfortably on high salaries, with their income erasing any hardship associated with the car-free downtown life. That, or they’re single. Good for them, but perhaps not so good for a family type, or someone making significantly less.
As for that K-car story, let’s assume the Aries sedan of Micallef’s youth was a 1986 model with the base 2.2-liter engine. A common sight, once upon a time. Let’s also assume that Gurney is three years into paying off his CX-5. So, a 2016 model.
The EPA rated the 1986 Aires sedan (with three-speed automatic and 2.2L) at up to 23 mpg combined. The uplevel 2.5-liter engine (100 raging horses!) brought the combined figure down to 21 mpg, max. An all-wheel drive CX-5, with 2.5-liter four-cylinder under hood, returns 26 mpg on the combined cycle. 29 mpg for FWD models.
But crossovers are big, obnoxious vehicles, taking up space everywhere they go, right? Some are, but the 2016 CX-5 measures 179.3 inches from stem to stern, including the front license plate holder. The 1986 Aries sedan? 178.6 inches. A difference in length of seven-tenths of an inch.
What the CX-5 is, at its core, is a different way of packaging a vehicle into nearly the same footprint as the economy sedan of decades past. And it burns less fuel to boot, despite weighing significantly more and carrying an engine at least the same size as that earlier K-car. The CX-5’s rear cargo volume is also more than double that of the Aries’ trunk.
Yes, hockey-playing kids were able to cram into an Aries, but does that mean a present-day family of four is foolish for getting into a four-cylinder compact crossover and not a compact sedan? If fuel economy is your topmost concern, then I guess yes. The crossover that gets significantly better fuel economy than the “normal” sedans and wagons of yesteryear could be replaced by a smaller vehicle that gets even better fuel economy.
And in a world where the most ardent of urbanists, with the backing of the government, strictly defines what a private citizen can spend his or her money on, those crossovers would disappear in favor of a “just right” Goldilocks model produced by a nationalized company kept afloat by tax dollars and draconian regulations. Assuming, of course, that cars of any type are even allowed to exist in this future utopia. It’s a dreamworld envisioned quite often on Twitter, including certain corners of Car Twitter.
Efficiency and green living are not bad things. But only a top-down, scorched-earth reorganization of society and all buildings, residences, and transportation routes can accomplish the dream of an ecologically pure society. In place of the (inevitably damaging) revolution craved by so many, we have incremental advancements. More fuel efficient vehicles. Better transit. All of which takes time to accomplish and can still lead to people doing what works best for them.
It seems that, for some Twitter users, the fact Gurney chooses to own a vehicle at all is the real problem here. Never mind the fuel economy. In this type of argument, there can be no winner — just a lone person shouting a moral victory into an online void, confident in their sin-free status by virtue of place of residence and lack of vehicle ownership … and little else.
Our polarization problem continues apace.
[Images: Mazda, Chris Tonn/TTAC, Steph Willems/TTAC]
Is the “city” fuel economy all that different between a CX-5 v. Mazda 3 v. Mazda 6? (Same engine and transmission of course.) Is the city fuel economy that different between a FWD V6 Camry and the same Highlander?
I ask these questions because the people arguing are those who if told they needed to go from Albuquerque to Phoenix (420 miles roughly by road) would go get on a plane. Those carbon emissions pale by comparison.
What a wonderful circular firing squad they have going on.
At city speeds where aero plays no part, fuel economy is almost exactly related to weight. That’s what you have to get up to speed after every stop light or sign. The Mazda3 would get the best economy out of that trio even if all had the same 2.5l atmo and auto. The CX-5 would bring up the rear.
Can’t say engine for engine because mom has an iSport Mazda3 and gets 33 mpg combined. I have a similar duty cycle in my Mazda6, slightly heavier and with the larger engine, and get a combined 28 or 29 combined. I expect the Mazda3 would still do better with its slight weight advantage. Aerodynamics are roughly the same.
I have never seen less than 32 mpg in my manual transmission 2015 Mazda6. I check every time I fill up.
It’s primarily been due to my shortened commute. I lean more heavily suburban/city driving with 6 miles freeway in the morning and evening.
My overall average on fuelly over 25k miles is 30.8.
Makes sense…!
Cars only match planes fully loaded… if you have 3 or less people in a car a new plane is probably gonna be a lot more efficient.
Not if you have 3 or less people in a plane….
My issue with this whole argument is simple: Has the original poster to this twitter debate even seen a CX-5? They are tiny. It is a hatchback in all but name with 2.5 additional inches of ground clearance.
This is an argument over the difference between an gerbil and a hamster. The original twitter complainer has really picked the wrong vehicle to single out, but I do appreciate the sentiment. Somehow, humanity survived before the popularity of vehicles that have barge like dimensions and curb weights like many of today’s truly “full sized” trucks and SUVs…….and I dont recall being transported aboard smaller vehicles as being at all horrible and somehow, I have lived to tell the tale of the age of small family cars.
Fkin gerbils. Hamsters are way better.
Absolutely. Gerbils are escape artists – they can gnaw their way out of anything, including hamster cages.
One cannot justify a low riding sedan for family use these days. It is just too dangerous. With most other vehicles on the road being enormous and much taller, you have two big risks:
1. Taller vehicles, especially best selling full size pickups overriding your low car’s crumple zones and other safety systems, rendering them useless.
2. Having very limited visibility due to numerous tall vehicles, especially full size pickups, around you in traffic blocking your view.
Of course, tall vehicles have risks of their own but they have been mitigated by modern technology to a certain extent. Rollover risk is real and plenty of tall crossovers roll over, but it is not as bad as it used to be before ESP became mandatory.
It is an arms race that has been won by companies making enormous profits on enormous vehicles. Latest Motor Trend has an article on sedan vs crossover, comparing Blazer to Impala. The Blazer is $14k more expensive. I am not sure there is much difference in cost in producing these two vehicles. So the extra $14k they skim on each crossover/SUV/pickup sale is pure profit. No wonder that’s all they want to sell.
It must be sad to live one’s life ins uch fear, but I guess that’s life in the USA these days.
If customers weren’t willing to pay that difference, it wouldn’t exist. I personally dislike crossovers as Miss Schmitt, but I don’t think it’s my business to force others to buy what I want them to. The problem with the type of person similar to Angie Schmitt, is that it doesn’t stop with the crossover. It’s anything they seam excessive. It’s your crossover today, and my luxury sedan tommorow.
On a related note I needed to get home on Saturday evening around 7:30. I figured I would take public transportation since I wasn’t in a hurry, and the peak time made it $50 for an Uber. This is a 25 minute drive almost straight down a freeway. Google told me it would take 3.5 hours, and my trip wouldn’t start until the morning. This, in an area where the politicians tell you to take public transportation wherever you are going. Even if the buses were available, for who would a 3.5 hour bus ride be a good substitute for a 25 minute drive?
25 minutes for me, 3.5 hours for thee.
And these social engineering types don’t understand why their systems keep falling apart before they’re even off the ground. They should have studied the failures of communist utopias a little more closely.
buses are great for going from not really where you are to not really where you want to go, really slowly.
Please don`t view everything through the lens of your American experience. Public transit has proven very effective in many other nations. Particularly those where the government did not favour and heavily subsidize the use of individual cars, to the detriment of public transit.
I have yet to find a major city where it is not faster to travel via a subway or LRT than on the congested roads.
There are other factors at play @Arthur. It works well in cities like NYC and other high density places that are more European in style, but don’t view the USA through another country’s lens either. We have so much land there isn’t any reason to build European style cities. So we don’t. Hence mass transit doesn’t work as well in the majority of lower density mid to small cities across the USA. It is a problem that fortunately technology (autonomy and lower emission/electric) is solving.
Or we could let Government see it. Maybe we won’t subsidize the wrong fuel (diesel) like our European friends.
Even the best systems heavily favor the core. They end up shaped like an asterisk. They end up decent going from the CBD to an outside area, or vice versa. You have to get between two adjacent areas on the asterisk, and you are still traveling downtown.
Public transit is more heavily used elsewhere, but in Europe the car is still the dominant form of ground travel, with over 80% of passenger-km share in the EU-28.
In the UK for example, passenger-km went from a bit over 200 billion to over 800 billion from 1952 to 2017, and the car took more than 100% of that growth. Brits uses public transit and cycle less than they did in 1952.
How many times are we going to stir this pot based on some silly Twitter exchange?
EXACTLY! Every lunatic crank, previously confined to raging alone in the confines of their basement, or perhaps letter writing if able, now thanks to social media can poison and provoke the rest of us. We need to learn to ignore them.
It’s called “clickbait” and it works. There isn’t a single guy commenting here who would appreciate their “needs” being dictated by the rest of us. As stated above didn’t we learn that the communist utopias of the last 100 years don’t work? So why do we think it’s ok to tell others what they should drive? I’ll drive whatever I damn please and I’ll defend your right to do the same
I regard CUV’s as nothing more than ‘raised station wagons’. And a station wagon is a much more utilitarian vehicle than a sedan.
Due to increased emphasis on aerodynamics, too many sedans/coupes are lacking in the greenhouse area and too difficult to get into/out of.
Hatchbacks generally suffer from the same issue of low ride height, small greenhouse, small back seat and often not enough room for 2 hockey bags + sticks and possibly weekend luggage.
So I can fully support the purchase/use of CUV’s, over sedans/coupes and even over traditional station wagons. I also appreciate any increased road clearance, when travelling over loose snow and increased ride height in weather when large tractor-trailers are throwing ‘rooster tails’ of rain/sleet/snow thereby decreasing visibility.
However a mini-van still represents the most efficient use of space in a vehicle. Which is why the station wagon market was decimated by the introduction of the mini-van. It carries more than a CUV, with better (vertical) space integration. The sliding doors are a bonus.
As to large SUV’s and the belief that AWD/4WD is a ‘necessity’, well I will side with the ‘environmentalists’ in that regard.
And I write this as someone with 5+ decades of driving around Ontario, Quebec, Michigan and upper New York state, as a hockey player/parent/coach, as well as driving to skating and skiing competitions/lessons/trips.
Interesting dissertation. I assume that you frown on my current mode of transportation and daily driver; a 30ft+ Southwind Motorhome that gets 5-6mpg city AND highway.
It’s all I got. So it’ll have to do.
I would say that is the most utilitarian of all vehicles. You can take your entire family and all of your possessions with you wherever you go.
Possibly more environmentally friendly than any home since Dennis Weaver’s house made from recycled tires.
Haha! I feel the same way!
(But we were forced into this situation because the demand for rental houses is at an all-time high, and we were in Old Mexico for a few months winter/spring. We rented out our last empty house where we had been staying.)
My best friend asked if he could buy back the 1989 Camry V6 I had bought from him because his Chevy S-10 was down to a one-speed transmission.
So that left us with no other vehicles except Ye Olde Southwind.
Your daily driver is an RV? What happened to all the cars and trucks you’ve talked about having here?
Lie2me, I either gave them all away or sold them off, including the 2016 Sequoia and my 2016 Tundra.
I spend too much time away, traveling, or staying at our Villa in Ensenada, Old Mexico.
We’re “home” now to finalize some real estate transactions, for a little while.
I don’t think they are even higher anymore. Maybe if you look at a small window of vehicles during a period with low ride heights, but what was the ride heights on a 40 Ford or something.
“Our polarization problem continues apace.”
Indeed.
Go to any forum, covering topics ranging from bee keeping to microprocessor development, and sooner or later a keyboard brawl ensues.
The divide, for which the Grand Canyon would be a simple trench, are between lefties/greenies/granola eating liberals/pro-choice democrats Vs. the righties/monster truck owners/NRA-member conservatives/pro-life republicans.
And as you correctly stated, there are never a real winner. The only gain is additional resentment and perhaps even hatred against “those idiots” on the far end of the emotional divide.
I might be willing to care more about this argument if not for the fact that everybody I know who claims they `don`t need a car – public transportation is great` – was not endlessly trying to bum rides from me.
I feel the same as a truck owner. Many of my friends who don’t need one often want to bum mine.
Get a manual Cummins while you can. At least in San Francisco, that scares away most couch surfers, who need to move all their belongings every six weeks …
What I drive is nobody’s business by my own. What you drive (or don’t drive) is your business.
Get off my lawn!
Then quit whining about banning me from stopping by the store in my Deere.
They seem to have forgotten to account for the car seats that are now much bigger and required for much longer than in past decades.
This.
Also, many cars have horrible door openings that effectively make it impossible to use rear facing seats for very long, unless you slide your kid through sideways.
Other cars have badly designed rear seatbelts that are extremely hard to buckle when a child seat is installed.
I can’t wait for my son to transition to a forward facing seat. Hell I could rock a Challenger or an extended cab full size pickup if he was in a forward facing seat.
Its fun until his legs get longer…
Buckling them in to something like a Challenger would probably wreck your back. Best to wait until they can buckle themselves.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I saw a family of 5 in a Fiesta in Turkey. No safety seats for the kids in that car. But something that small could never be allowed to function as family transportation in America these days. Another hidden tax on the poor, when the only way to transport your family is to buy more car than you can afford.
My view is that a lot of the poor are running old Chrysler minivans which seem to age fairly well, even in the Great Lakes salt belt.
I can’t believe it took this long for this to come up in the comment thread.
Car seats are the #1 reason for needing a larger vehicle.
1) You can’t (legally) cram five kids into the back of either a K-car or a SUV.
2) The car seats take up space you would otherwise use for stuff.
“public transit, urban design, public art, community planning, and sustainable development.”
I’m surprised he missed out on “environmental and social justice.” Those are two more meaningless buzzwords self-important lefties like to use to describe themselves lately.
“the fight for sustainable transportation and livable communities” – no wonder there’s so much conflict these days. Why does everything have to be a fight?
Gosh, what angst. Let people buy what they want.
We CAN buy what we want. Just be advised that’s after some gub-mint beauracrats legislated many of your choices out of existence. Others will carry a penalty or tax for your ‘wrong choice’ and your moral betters may get an incentive for their ‘correct choice’ which you got to subsidize.
What car choices has the gubmint legislated away from you? If you have the scratch you can buy the Dodge Demon that accurately signals your manhood. The US has the most car choice & lowest operating costs in the world.
“What car choices has the gubmint legislated away from you?”
A lot, but a good discussion on it would read like a thesis paper.
What I was getting at was punditry praddling on about the “needs” of others. A CX-3 is a wasteful SUV? Geez
First off the Demon was a one time 3000 unit show.
Well let’s see…the chicken tax has kept numerous excellent vehicles off our shores. The VW Amarok, and dozens of swb 2 door 4×4’s for starters.
How about the vilification of light duty diesels since pretty much forever.
Government and insurance companies all but conspired to kill the muscle car era. It’s only in the last 10 years it’s seen a resurgence and the attempts to shove electrification down the throats of an overwhelming majority who doesn’t want it may kill it again.
Most importantly to me, the V8 Wrangler. Whether it’s due to CAFE constraints or more recently some made up crash test that it supposedly couldn’t pass, there’s always some obstacle/excuse for why this hasn’t happened even though there is bottomless demand. The number of shadetree swaps and the fact that turnkey conversions costing 10’s of thousands are happening all the time says that billions have been left on the table.
The fact that mfgs have to re-certify a vehicle on several levels for even minor changes is the reason why a LOT of really awesome niche vehicles with a small but passionate market simply can’t happen. Follow the red tape and the money and you’ll find out exactly why something like a new Ramcharger just can’t happen.
I can go on all day but as Danio has pointed out it’d read like a novel.
The fair comparison would be how the Aries would fare if built with today’s tech. Also notice what the Aries and Mazda share, a rear door with a properly squared roofline that makes it easy to get in and out, or to latch up a car seat. How automakers lost sight of such a basic fact is mind boggling!
I’m waiting for the day when everybody except me has an electric car and I’m buying gas for the taxes levied plus a nickle a gallon.
Will never happen.
The minimum price still needs to generate a profit.
Therefore, you have to have a price that meets the variable cost of producing gasoline, as well as the fixed expenses to produce even a single drop and supply it to you.
The result is that decreasing demand will cause prices to fall, to a point, but then you will see prices begin to creep up.
If only one gallon of gas was sold in the US, the cost would be astronomical. At some point before that, you would not be able to afford to buy the gas as demand falls.
The person that wins is the person who decides it is not up to them to decide what other people “need”.
Exactly. And that’s why you’ll find me solidly on the right/libertarian spectrum. They aren’t perfect, but by and large you won’t find that side trying to browbeat the left to make ‘approved choices’.
Just don’t try to get an abortion or smoke a joint in a red state. Those are certainly ‘unapproved choices’.
I’ve been both the fancy queer with that ‘libral eju-cation’ when I’ve lived in Alabama– automatically the enemy. Assigned by the others’ lizard brain.
And I’ve also been the shamed public university social climber when I’ve lived in Lauderdale– automatically the enemy. Assigned the role by the other’s lizard brain.
In reality, I’m such a fair and open centrist that my simplified political color is purple.
The root of this is that the other will never allow themselves to be sated. It is the zeitgeist, and it is wrecking our species. I call it guerrilla love– wrote about it surfacing in feminist art class way back when.
Failed the class.
Current Western culture dictates we self-identify and champion one specific thing. It comes from the hyper-specialization trend. This automatically allows the receiver to easily formulate a response, or wholly neuters the transmitter from the outset of communications.
I have no place for this in my life and will not be browbeat to self-identify myself into social victimhood.
Feminist Art thesis: “The feminist movement was in it’s second-wave at the time of my birth and my psyche was formed after feminist theory had been absorbed into the collective consciousness.” In other words: The weight of that original sin will not be applied to this man to make you feel better about it having been applied to you.
Coffee is good.
iNeon put this so eloquently, I was just going to say that people suck
@jack4x (golf clap)
Politically I lean Libertarian so if you want to curtail individual freedoms from either side of the spectrum I say: “A pox on both their houses.”
Dan, I agree completely. Live and let live. Seems this philosophy is slipping away from us no matter who is in power these days.
@jack…you can get an abortion in every state in the Union. I’ve lived in the bluest and the redest and it’s true everywhere.
Sometimes they try restrict it. The court will either uphold it or strike it down. They always comply with those decisions though. Marijuana is illegal. When the time comes it isnt, which will likely be soon, those states will comply.
Contrast that with blue states. We don’t like immigration law, so we aren’t going to enforce it (though the courts are with them on much of that), we don’t like drug law, so we aren’t going to enforce it. That list goes on.
If red States behaved like blue in this respect you really wouldn’t be able get an abortion in Alabama and blue states would want the Army sent in.
Chicken and egg: More people using public transit would create demand and revenue for better public transit. Traveling on congested highways you see plenty of drivers who should be forced to take public transit. They can be in any size vehicle, but the worst are the fart-can equipped “sport sedans” zig-zagging their way to somewhere important. My solution has been around for a long time: drastically raise standards for a drivers’ license. Make it more like an airplane, with mandatory retesting every few years. And if the higher standards took away my license I wouldn’t mind, as long as there were real alternatives in public transportation. As it stands, there’s one bus every hour that could take me to work, and any other activity, shopping, recreation, vacation, requires both me and my wife to have a car.
Public transportation requires high population density to be feasible, and thus won’t work in much of the country; at least until autonomous vehicles eliminate the need for fixed routes.
The real solution for fixing America’s driving woes are more traffic law enforcement. Not stupid speed traps… but going after cell phone users and left lane campers. People drive like crap on the road because there is zero consequence for doing so.
Things sure do get twisted. Here we have presumably left leaning green types yearning for the way things used to be. I thought that was for deplorables?
I thought this was a site for automotive news. Two people in a Twitter p****ng match is not news.
Oh, yes, the Streetsblog/Curbed group. All cars are bad, mmkay ? Anything we can do to inconvenience car owners (cameras ! Street Diets ! Parking is a subsidy !) . In the reducto ab aburdium of the internet, it’s a short trip to “i bike everywhere even in blizzards and don’t every fly on planes” …
If you want to live in Brooklyn as a hermit its up to you….but this group has already done enough to destroy streets in Manhattan ….
I see this sometimes when I launch my small standup jetski. The Kayakers can sometimes be holier than thou at the ramp.
You serve the people you are denigrating. You are in need of a processor upgrade.
TTAM (The Truth About Mazda) stars another push for the sad, declining Mazda brand – “It all started after Toronto-based journalist Matt Gurney, suburban owner of a Mazda CX-5 (an excellent choice for those going the crossover route, by the way) replied to a tweet by Angie Schmitt, a writer at Streetsblog USA”. Thus continues week three of the current “All Mazda All Week” series. I wonder what compensation this site gets from the folks in Hiroshima beyond ballcaps, dinners, airline flights, and hotel stays? Even a repeat introductory photo of the CX-5 from one of the several recent Mazda love poems.
I am just closing the deal on a new 2019 3 row Tiguan. With 4 kids frequently in my vehicle (1 rear facing, 1 front facing, 1 harness booster, 1 backless booster) I saw this as a good fit. When the cousins aren’t with us, I will run with the larger cargo space from folding down the 3rd row. While large, this still is classified as a “compact”.
I didn’t do extensive research, but say I didn’t want to go the SUV/CUV/Van route. Does there even exist a 7 passenger vehicle in the guise of a traditional station wagon?
The Ford Flex. But you’re running out of time on that one.
As a point of contention, you’re not “saving $600,000” by buying in one of Toronto’s nearby communities. Anything even remotely affordable (re.$500-600k) is roughly the same smaller place on a postage stamp property as you might find in Toronto for not much more ($600-800k). Except by moving to the burbs (and still not getting any space), you’re forced into a car-dependent lifestyle (because transit is even more abysmal than the mediocre TTC, and good luck getting to work downtown if that’s where you’re employed, and walking is just not done out there), and a two-car family is pretty much mandatory (while one-car is pretty feasible in the city). Worse, the traffic isn’t great out in those burbs (because everyone’s car dependent, and it’s still more dense than the road networks can allow, AAAND we force the completely incompetent drivers to still be out on the roads rather than finding a suitable alternative for them). Basically, the entire GTA is a complete mess that should be burned to the ground so we can start fresh.
Meanwhile, while I really don’t care for crossovers, I’m pretty sure most urbanists wouldn’t look askance at a 15-year old Toyota Matrix that gets the exact same fuel economy as a CX-5 or RAV4.
Although I do agree with the gist of your posting, there are exceptions.
The City of Markham is creating a ‘rapid transit’ route along Highway #7. Once completed it will hopefully take some of the strain off the road system.
And anyone living within walking distance of a GO station has experienced rapid growth in their house values. As demonstrated by the chart linked below.
https://dailyhive.com/toronto/zoocasa-cost-homes-near-go-transit-2019%5D
Absolutely – although, as it is, half the Go stations aren’t within walking distance of much of anything, and like you say, the other ones have seen a big bump in cost. From my casual searching, Hamilton is pretty much the closest to a workable alternative, and that’d still work out to a 90min+ commute for my wife (who works near Queens Park), and easily an hour for me (going to near the airport) if I left at 6:30 in the morning.
All I can say is with the 2014 Avenger vs the 2013 Rogue is that the Avenger has more rear seat legroom, better mileage (mixed and hwy), 100 more hp, and we can haul just as much on our long road trips. A minivan would be even better than the Rogue.
That said, I might rather have a CX-5 than say a Yaris.
There was a recent article about twitter, noting that many companies mistake twitter traffic as being representative of public opinion. The sad fact is that twitter is heavily laden with cranks and single issue advocates, and twitter consensus bears no relationship to the concerns of the majority of the general public. That applies to all other social media, not just twitter.
The recommendation to companies was to advertise sparingly on social media and don’t take it seriously. Individuals might do well to copy that: use it sparingly, and consider it nothing more than a diversion, for entertainment purposes only, like watching monkeys in a zoo.
Amen. A lesson I’m trying to beat into my own head. Thanks for the reminder.
These people make me want to drive my SuperDuty more often, just out of spite.
Not really a topic that interest me. A lot of people on twitter will say anything just to get attention. Most of us could do with a lot less twitter including our Prez.
Not really a topic that interest me. A lot of people on twitter will say anything just to get attention. Most of us could do with a lot less twitter including our Prez.