Business & Tech

Your Next Car: What's It Going to Be?

I'm hoping to drive my old beater into the ground before we need to get another car, but I'm on the lookout. What's your next car going to be?

My wife and I drive a perfectly good 2002 Nissan Sentra with 127,318 miles on it. "Stella" has four wheels and gets us from Point A to Point B.

We've reached the stage in the life of the car where we don't repair body damage (as you can tell from the accompanying photo). I'm ashamed for my Dad to see it. But hey, it's paid for.

Even though I'd love to get 200K miles out of Stella, she has some mechanical problems, like a seized bolt that has left the transmission fluid unchangeable for about eight years. She could conk out any old day.

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So we've been on the lookout for our next car. I'm paying attention to car commercials, asking friends about their cars. You know the feeling.

We're looking for something that gets good gas mileage, and is probably on the small side. We don't have kids and our dog isn't especially big.

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If Stella died today, our top choice is a MINI Cooper. We've test driven one at MINI of Peabody, and really got a kick out of it. One of my fellow patch editors has a 2006 Toyota Yaris he swears by (even though he's like eight feet tall). Another coworker just got a Hyundai Elantra that he's pretty happy about.

Readers, what about you? What are looking for in your next car? Got your eye on any particular make and model?


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