Car Shopping

My current car is about eight years old and I like it a lot. It's a 2005 Ford Five Hundred with AWD and a continuously variable transmission. It's got about 72000 miles on it, because I've been driving less since I started working at home.

However, I like to keep track of what the next car is that I'm likely to buy, because you never know when you'll have to buy a car now. I've had my eye on the Ford Fusion for a while now and even had an opportunity to take catalana's car on an extended test drive when she flew home to her parents out of O'Hare one year. And the Fusion would work.

Well, except that the 2013 Fusion is a whole new car, based on the Mondeo platform from Europe. This meant that it was time to check sizing again, because I need a lot of headroom. I was chatting with my friend Clark (who works for Ford) about this down at Chambanacon and he suggested that I should look at the C-Max, which is apparently also new in the U.S. for this model year. I'm always skeptical about these things, but I figured that sooner or later I'd get around to taking a look.

And today I was out Christmas shopping by myself, so I figured I'd head to a nearby Ford dealer and check it out. I warned the salesman that I wasn't in the market right now, but that I wanted to do some research.

It turns out that the new Fusion might work, but it feels a bit small to me.

The C-Max is big in terms of headroom. The one I sat in had a sunroof and I still fit in it.

And all of the C-Max models are hybrids -- some of them are plug-in models, although that's more than I would need.

I must think about this...