What I Want to Drive

This is currently the object of my lust:

Alright, it isn’t so much the object of my lust as the vehicle I am now looking closely at as possibly being our next automobile purchase. The above is a picture of a 2009 Subaru Forester, and it is what I would like my wife to be driving right now.

However, she is driving a 2005 Ford Freestar instead. While the Freestar has served us well, we are now at a different spot in our lives than we were when we picked up our van. Truth be told, the van has been invaluable as we will have moved five times since we purchased it. The ability to put down the rear seat and have just a cargo area has proven to be invaluable during those moves. There are two weaknesses that currently remain.

One is fuel economy. At 22 mpg on the highway, it is a far way from the 32 mpg that we were able to attain with our 2002 Ford Focus we originally had at the beginning of our marriage (and even farther away from the 40 mpg I can get with my 1996 Toyota Corolla … still running strong). The Forester would afford us 27 mpg on the highway, which is huge when we fully expect to travel back and forth between Milwaukee and New Ulm often.

The second weakness is one of winter driving. With another child on the way (July!), next winter we will have two kids and my wife taking care of them. The van is not the best vehicle for winter driving, being FWD and rather large and bulky, and the AWD that the Forester has would help in that regard. It would go a long way in giving me a quieter mind during the winter months knowing that my wife has a decent winter vehicle to drive in.

Besides those two, the thing just looks good! It’s not overly ornate and has a minimal amount of fuss about it (which I like).

This is a long-term goal for me as I need to do a lot more research and wait for the right vehicle to present itself (along with working with the bank again). As such, hopefully we will have a new vehicle come October 2011, two years into our Great Van Experiment.