Finding your best car – loaded with all the features you would love!

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We loved our first car – Toyota Avensis! Though it was second hand and quite old, it has always been the best, had emotional values and it was hard to let it go when it was time to change! It was me who lost the steering and hit a parked car but our beloved Toyota has taken all the injuries and knowing that we wouldn’t let him go, it felt like he found a way himself!

So…. It was the time for the change! And finding a new car wasn’t that easy. We wanted to buy a good car – loaded with safety, designed with lots of care, having families “love to haves” in mind and most importantly, not huge but spacious seven seater SUV (as we often have guests and visitors from India)

After doing plenty of research, we narrowed down our selection to just 3 – SEAT Alhambra, Volvo XC90 and Volkswagen Tiguan. Based on the features, built, size of the car, boot size with and without the seventh row, family friendly features etc, our final decision was to go with Vovlo XC90.

So here are some tips on choosing the car that suits you best

Decide the size of the car:

It purely depends on how many maximum number of people you would have in the car at any point of time – If you are just two, or planning to extend your family in near future or.. are you someone who are just like who would expect visitors quite often! As mentioned, we are a four member family but our extended family visits us quite often, so we decided to go for a sever seater!

Number of cars in your family:

The first point regarding the size of the car could well be influenced by this point. If you can afford to have more than one car at home (considering the usage, MOT, Road Tax, Insurance etc), then, maybe having more than one smaller cars is just ok!!! After all when you live in a busy city, it is easy to find the parking and move around!

Safety features:

Inevitably, this would be one of the most important feature any one would look for, especially while having children! But, please also remember, more the built in safety and features, the more will be cost of the car! Out of all three, Volvo was the most expensive one, but we didn’t want to compromise on features and thought of getting the best one!

If you have littleones who needs car seats, it is better to do a safety check. cars.com conducts car seat safety checks to help you have peace of mind while fitting the car seats in your new car.

Family friendly features:

This includes some features like having a media play support (including USB, Built-in DVD Player, Built-in SatNav, having the ability to convert the middle passenger seat into a booster seat, foldable third row, sun roof, roof rack, side step etc.

You may have to consider having these features if you are someone who would do long drives quite often and want to entertain the kids during the long boring hours! We are out and about most times for DD1’s Badminton tournaments and short breaks, so prefer to have these features built-in. It is best to consider buying a car, having all these features already installed as it might cost more if you plan to have them done later – consider the labour cost!

Saying all those, after researching through many sites, we finally decided to go via Volco dealers as the Guarantee and warranty had more add-on benefits and was affordable too! It was finally the peace of mind you desire than the cost involved (as far as it is just a little more to pay and not a huge difference between the local sellers and authorise dealers)

If you live in UK, the car dealers named Auto Traders, CarGurus seem to be the best places who sell most make and models. My friend who lives in America mentioned about Cars.com that seem to be a one stop shop for buying your favourite car.