Well, you're in luck, because I just finished a long, rambly post about it over on private-mail. I make no warranty that it will actually contain any useful information, but it's got my honest opinions in it.

>Car and Driver are the worst offenders here. Those guys? Are
>snobs. It's all about performance, performance, performance,
>with that metric consistently defined against high-end sportscars.
>They seem offended by the very idea of an economy car.

Oh man, I know. I noticed that while I was doing my own research. It's like getting cars-for-ordinary-people advice from Top Gear, except without the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that it isn't in their wheelhouse. (Some of my favorite TG segments were the ones where Clarkson would do as bad a review as humanly possible of an economy car. Particularly the one where he used a Ford Fiesta as a beach assault vehicle during a Royal Marines exercise.)

>And don't even get me started over the current vogue
>for low-mileage leases for well-qualified buyers. Some of us have...
>blemishes... on our credit.

For what it's worth, I had pretty attractive lease offers made to me on at least two different cars (both of them Fords, as it happens, so mileage may vary by manufacturer), and my credit's not perfect either. Not as aggressive as the figures they quote on the TV commercials, but still quite good. I'm wary of leases because they used to be such a punchline in these parts—a stock device for shady dealers to lever money out of people who didn't have it, the automotive finance equivalent of payday loans—but nowadays they're not like that, at least not the ones offered through the manufacturers by main-line franchised dealers. I ended up financing because I didn't buy a leasable car, but would have at least given it serious consideration if I had ended up going with one of the ones I had both lease and finance numbers for.

As for matters like reliability and ease of service, I admit I don't have a lot of data on those fronts for my new car as yet, because I just got it and, thanks to the certified-preowned warranty extension, won't be doing my own work on it for some time. I know what you mean about the various design gotchas out there—the most egregious one I've seen personally in recent years is my mom's 2009 Cadillac SRX4, to change a headlight bulb in which you have to put it up on a lift and remove the front wheel and inner fender on the affected side. Seriously. That's someone at GM deliberately setting out to create business for dealers right there. There's just no way it could be that badly designed by accident, not in this day and age. That's on purpose.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.