Choosing A Family Car

My childless self owned an Audi A3, which I'm pretty sure wasn't full of junk. However, once children arrived, it became apparent that lifting a car seat in and out of a three door car wasn't the wisest thing to be doing with chronic back issues and so I updated to my first estate. And I'm not going to lie, it made me itchy. At the time my husband commented that we should probably buy a people carrier, seeing as I always wanted more children but I refused to test drive one. I think I simply equated a people carrier with middle age and like Dylan Thomas I was not going gently into that dark night! So I raged (in a conformist, middle aged way) and we bought an estate. And then we had three children and three car seats didn't fit. And picking friends up for play dates or carrying extra passengers became impossible and I realised that I was an idiot and suddenly a people carrier seemed like a brainwave. So we had a rejig. My husband inherited my car and sold his prized sporty, 2 litre petrol Mercedes, which could probably have serviced the national debt of a small country and I got my people carrier.

But not before doing lots of research. I read review after review. Safety features, design features, affordability, milage, boot space. We toured garages and I test drove lots of cars but kept coming back to the Peugeot 5008. It had all the space we needed without the feeling of being a huge car. It felt good to drive, got really great reviews and it looked OK. The absolute deciding factor for me was the five star rating the car received from the Euro NCAP. The European New Car Assessment Programme is a car safety performance assessment programme, founded by the UK Department for Transport and backed by several European governments and the EU.

They created the five-star safety rating system, determined from a series of vehicle tests, representing real life accident scenarios that could result in injured or killed car occupants or other road users. There's a really great website, enabling you to search all makes and models, giving a quick synopsis and a more detailed safety report to download. Our budget didn't extend to a new car so we sourced a UK car, which tend to have higher specifications for better value. My husband set off on a trains, planes and automobiles adventure. He flew to Liverpool, took an hours train journey, picked up the car, drove to Holyhead and took the ferry home. Even with paying the vehicle registration tax, we managed to save a couple of thousand euro. But the best part was, the children's seats magically came with Kinder Eggs!

4 of us moved into our shiny new car and it quickly became an extension of our home. Sadly, it even more quickly lost its shine, aided in part by a mildly traumatic trapping in a car wash but that's possibly a story for another day!