By Jeanne Wieland | Editor
This is the true story of how two moms went to the 2009 Greater Milwaukee Auto Show to look at anything other than minivans and fell in love with – this is predictable, right? – a minivan.
As MilwaukeeMoms.com web producer Erika Rutley and I walked to the show at the Midwest Airlines Center, just blocks from our office, we agreed that we wanted to do a story that would show moms (and dads too, of course) that there’s more to mom-mobiles than minivans. With that in mind, we hit the Auto Show floor to see what’s new and exciting in vehicles for families.
And in short order, we were near the Mazda 5 and found ourselves drawn like moths to an interior dome light. Curses! Despite our best-laid plans, the minivan sucked us in.
We loved the Mazda 5 because at first glance, it really didn’t appear to be a minivan. And once we were close enough to see that it was, we had to like it anyway. (The Madza rep at the show told us that the Mazda 5 technically isn’t a minivan, but to those of us who don’t know a Xenon headlight from a Halogen headlight, it is. You’ll just have trust us on this.)
The Mazda 5 seats six people in three rows of two. It’s tall, like a minivan, but the second-row windows go all the way down, unlike most minivans, which lends to its more car-like feel. It wasn’t high off the ground like an SUV, but it also didn’t feel as low to the street as most standard cars.
In other words, it didn’t quite fit in the category of any of the other vehicles we saw at the show, and we liked it for that. At the same time, it had the full complement of safety features, including car-seat latches on the third-row seats and a 5-star safety rating, two cup holders per row of seats and a fold-out tray table in the second row.
Gas mileage was a respectable 21 city/27 highway with an automatic transmission and the price wasn’t bad either. The Mazda 5 starts at about $19,000 and ends up at $24,000 fully tricked out.
But the Mazda 5 wasn’t the only family-friendly vehicle that caught our eyes. Right as we entered the door it was hard not to notice the new Ford Flex – and that wasn’t only because it was so big. Continue >
