Summer has come, school has ended, and students have graduated. If you have a student in your family, you’re probably wondering what would make a good graduation gift. Well, why not a car? Nothing too expensive or super outlandish, of course. Something with a small price tag, good safety features and good fuel efficiency. Well, if you’re generous enough to be shopping in the automobile market on behalf of a recent graduate, let us point you in the right direction. With fuel economy, safety and, of course, affordability in mind, we’ve compiled a list of vehicles we think would make absolutely phenomenal graduation gifts.
Car News
10 Ways Modern Cars Keep Us Safe
If you’ve been inside a newer car lately, it’s very likely you’ve seen some of the awesome safety technologies new cars come with these days. While cars have become more reliable, longer-lasting and more fuel-efficient in recent years, safety is really where cars have grown by leaps and bounds. In the past, it was all cars could do to protect us during a crash. Today, they actively try to prevent crashes.
We decided we wanted to take a closer look at just what cars are doing to keep us safe. While some of the best safety features on the road today have become standard in many cars, some of the coolest have yet to become mainstream. To help give you an idea of what, exactly, cars are doing to keep the airbags from going off, we put together a list of what we think are 10 of the coolest, most interesting and best safety innovations automakers put into cars.
Would You Drive Your Dream Car Every Day?
What’s your daily driver?
Most of us have a car we drive every day to work, to the grocery store and to the corner market when we’re jonesin’ for a peach Snapple.
The car that transports us in our daily activity usually is not the same car we dream of cruising, or racing, on the weekends. Whether it’s a project car or an off-the-lot new car that you’ve always dreamed of owning, odds are you’re not going to drive it every day once it’s been obtained.
But you know what? Maybe you should.
Bigger and Better: Combining Cargo Capacity and Fuel Economy
Every driver has a different set of expectations and needs for his or her primary vehicle. What meets my needs might not work for you at all, and your ideal car might be the last one I’d ever consider buying for myself. No wonder arguments about cars often get out of hand.
CarGurus user reviews provide a good idea of whether and how well a particular car met the needs of one driver, and based on car reviews received from our users over the course of the last year, it looks like most drivers are pleased with their cars. Our user reviews invite submitters to score a car from 1 to 5 points in a number of different categories, and with more than 10,000 reviews received from April 2013 through April 2014, three categories received average scores of 4.5—Reliability, Style and Overall—and Front Seat, Handling, Power and Price each earned averages of more than 4.
The two categories that received the lowest average scores were Cargo Space at 3.9 and Fuel Economy at 3.7. These qualities generally have had to be traded off in vehicles, since increasing size reduces fuel economy with all other things being equal. But cars get better with every passing year, and these days it’s possible to find vehicles with plenty of room as well as reasonable gas mileage. So here’s a look at our top 10 2014 vehicles for cargo capacity and mileage across a number of segments.
Ten Best Cars for Lovers of the Great Outdoors
Fall is the time of homecoming football games, apple picking, and camping before colder weather sets in. Here are 10 cars for the great outdoors, no matter what you’re looking to do.
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