I had a friend who sold used cars in the 70’s and 80’s, back then the color green was the hardest car to sell, kind of funny I am looking at picking up a green monte carlo with white racing stripes over the car trunk hood and bumperas a toy. I do not think racing stripes were a factory option, anyone know?
I got a small crank that’s why! I guess I’ll go with a SOUL!
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Wow! More power to you. Word on the street is that one is endowed with a “small crank,” then SOP (standard operating procedure) dictates the purchase of a Monster Truck of some sort and installation of a set of Truck Nutz.
CSA
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I don’t particularly like the looks of the sportage, but I don’t think it looks girlie either. Mini’s may look girlish, as well those little Fiats, but not the sportage. Still I’m not a good one to ask about modern car aesthetics. I find most new car body designs these days way over the top. Weird headlights, windows, tail lights, it’s all too much. And I won’t even go into the wagon train wheels. BMW is an exception, they continue to have a lot of cars continuing with their timeless body design. Porsche too. Many Lexus models don’t suffer from the over-the-top symptom. In fact man of them are very much understated. But most of those are so understated that they look like a generic clay model car; i.e. the basic design you’d start with before you jazzed it up a bit. Early 90’s, those were the days for nice looking car designs. I expect we’ll see some more nice lookers coming out in the early 2020’s, body designs tend to cycle on 30 year intervals.
Understatement Alert!
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One thing that’s important to us (not me) is whether the car has a smile or not on the front end. I had never even noticed it before but some cars frown and some growl and others smile. We would never buy a car that didn’t smile but I might.
I drive a Miata. If you think it’s girly, then, fine, the next sunny day don’t look at me when I fly past you with the top down, zooming along. Heck, I drive a scooter, too. If you think I’m girly, then, okay, that’s what you think. Me, I don’t care.
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@Nevada_545; Thanks for posting that Lexus pic, I am not sure what happened to Lexus. Maybe some asked for a little bit more design but they have suddenly gone way over the top.
I would be pretty comfortable driving a Miata or a Mini (I even fit in them being 6ft tall). My new daily driver is a quirky looking Veloster, my wife calls it the “roach”, might be “girly” but was affordable and it is fun with decent mileage despite the Turbo. I wanted the white but they did not have it and they gave me a good discount on an orange one which had more bells and whistles, so I couldn’t pass.
I live in a smaller town (9,000 pop) surrounded on 3 sides (river on the fourth) by agricultural. Over the years I’m seeing an increase of females driving giant pickups and SUVs. I have no small crank explanation for that.
Are they attempting to out ugly the Pontiac Aztec?
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I think the Mitsubishi Evos started it.
I like the Lexus “spool” grill. It looks particularly good on the new LC500.
… Um… What?
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Spend a few grand more and buy a 4 door jeep sport wrangler. They’ll hold their value much better.
I recently purchased a 17 RAV4 after test driving the Soul, Sportage, Sorento, HRV, CRV, CX5 and a couple other cars. Many of these cars are quite different but I bought the RAV4 due to toyota quality (many cars in the family at 250K++), extra cargo space (just had first baby and plan to have another soon).
I thought the sporatge was fine but they have terrible resale value. This only matters when you sell it or get in an accident (gap insurance would be a good idea). If I recall correctly the dealer offered $19.9 on the sportage which I thought was quite high for the kia. I know that I could have got a better price but it was early in the test drives and I wanted to see what else was out there.
I though that the Sorento was a nice car but after driving others I still ended up with the RAV4.
The CX5 would be a more fun car to drive but the seat was horrible. My back was hurting before the test drive was over. It has wantabe race car seats that wrap around your side. They were too narrow for my shoulders. I also thought the interior was cheap in the Mazda.
The CRV and HRV both had horrible road noise. I was also not sold on the transmission. Some variable something transmission. I pull a small trailer behind my cars sometimes and I wanted a durable time proven transmission.
The RAV4 was $22.9 which I though was a good price but not a great price. The down side to the RAV4 is that the gas mileage is not as good as expected. My wife drives the car and commutes 65 miles to work. Our average mileage is about 25 mpg. Most miles are on the turnpike at 80-85 mph. The gas tank is small (11 ish gallons) and we spend a lot of time at the pump. Yeah if my wife would leave a few minutes earlier and slow down it would likely get 30+ as advertised.
Good choice; a friend also bought one for his wife, after looking at Honda and others. Too bad nearly all Honda vehicles suffer from excessive road noise. The CVT transmission in the Honda would turn me off as well.
At 80-85 mph no car gets good gas mileage!! If your wife slows down to 65-70 mph her mileage will improve considerably.
In order to save money on the development and the production of their smaller cars, manufacturers typically do not spend much time on trying to eliminate noise, vibration, and harshness from those cheaper models. One of the many nice things that you get when you pay more for a higher-end model is that much of the vibration and harshness has been engineered out of the vehicle, and much more sound-deadening insulation has been placed in the vehicle.
Additionally, I noted years ago that Hondas tended to have more road noise than their competitors, and apparently this hasn’t changed–at least with their cheaper models.