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We just came back from a long weekend away, driving the family minivan. Old Faithful is looking a bit banged up, inside and out, showing some of its 170,000 miles more evidently than in the past. We know we’ll need a new car some day, but in the meantime, we are nursing this awesome Toyota Sienna like an elderly relative, until it gives up on us for once and for all.

Since we know cars don’t last forever, we’ve been going to auto shows and occasional bouts of car shopping for over a year now. (You won’t be surprised to hear it took us three years + to find a house we liked enough to buy.) But over the course of this idle shopping, the metrics in what we expect out of a car keep changing.

When we first bought the minivan, I felt my youth draining away- I had officially become a soccer mom driving the minivan. But after a short period of time, between two kids, many road trips to see relatives and the like, you begin to realize the minivan is, at the core, a practical family solution. We can fit seven people in, making trips to exotic places like the Zoo or Science Center, with another mom and kids easy. Everyone travels together, making the trip a lot more fun and social. We can buy furniture at the outlets and bring it home easily, without renting a truck. Groceries and kids and carpool are all reasonable in one trip. The karate bag, which the youngest could have used as a mobile home for many years, still fits easily in the rear and often seems to be its permanent home.

Now that the kids will soon be 13 and 10, and as we approach a new vehicle, do I still need the van? Do I still need the seven passenger seating? Do I want something a little more grown-up? At one point, the cross-over type vehicles seemed like maybe they could work- enough room to still haul what we need to haul, but some with similar fuel economies of the minivan, or a little less. Some of the high-end crossovers are price pointed in a narrow range, making a BMW, Lexus, Mercedes and a fully rocked out minivan all around $40,000, making it seem tempting to jump into a more posh ride.

Yet, fuel has gradually gotten more expensive, to the point where it’s now over $4.00 a gallon in many places. This has turned fuel economy up to one of the most important factors we’re going to consider. When the van was $35 a week to fill up, that was one thing. Now it’s regularly over $60 dollars, and that doubling in price is being felt elsewhere in our budget. When we went to the most recent car show in Philadelphia, we looked again at the Lexus Hybrid, the Toyota Hybrids and those from Saturn. While the smaller hybrid models like the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic are nice, the room is still an issue for our young family. I think the only six seater hybrid I saw was the Toyota Highlander. While there’s a few more coming on the market- a Tahoe and a Yukon, I believe, the mileage is still in the 27 mpg range- not much better than my minivan.

Which begs the question- Why the heck haven’t the auto companies forseen the need for a hybrid minivan? Do they think only commuters want a hybrid? If anyone is under a financial stress from gas prices, it’s families, who drive kids all over creation daily. One of the reasons my minivan has 170,000 miles is due to this cause- I would regularly put over 100 miles a day on my car, running kids to and from school, errands and activities. I don’t just like hybrids, or think they’re cute, or think they’re green- with the miles I put on the car, they are a necessity, plain and simple.

I know I am not the only parent or family in this boat, and hopefully by blogging about what we want and need, auto makers will start taking notice. We need a fuel efficient Minivan/crossover with seating for seven. It should have all the cool minivan features, but it needs the fuel efficiency and the passenger room left intact. Please- the first company who meets the growing cry will clean up, I am sure of it.

Kids are learning about global warming in school. Parents around here are making more efforts to use the new cloth-like grocery bags, recycling them from trip to trip. (In fact, they are such a vast improvement over the old bags, I didn’t hesitate at all about paying $0.99 per bag) If we are all willing to adopt such measures in small ways on a daily basis, realizing the bigger overall impact we can have, is it too much to ask for the auto makers to give us a vehicle that meets our needs and/or exceeds them while providing us the needed fuel economy and the positive environmental impact as well?

I know we’ll hold out on replacing our minivan as long as we can at this point, awaiting a hybrid minivan or the next best thing, the Toyota Highlander Hybrid. The dreams of the luxury crossover are gone, replaced by practicality mixed with a longing for something I both want to drive, will be proud to own, and meets the needs of my family. Like my house, my car is a part of the family as well, and function mixed with utility is the most important metric of all.

by Whitney Hoffman

Photo graciously provided by davidburns, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved