My wife has a Corolla. It's completely fine. It's so functional and inoffensive that I think they should simply call it the Toyota Car or something. That's not even an insult, exactly. It's just that... functional.

I have a Mazda 3. It is honestly a driver's car. Not in terms of raw performance. But I've been driving it since 2008 and it is still a joy to drive every single day.

(It's matched the Corolla for reliability, too! Aside from the damn wheels. 17" rims with low profile tires = rims perpetually getting banged out of whack by potholes. Annoying, but not exactly a mechanical issue with the drivetrain)

There are many times while daily driving the RX7 that I thought I should have just gotten a Corolla. It's an absolutely fantastic car.

But then I'm driving again and the smile is ear to ear.

My first car was an early generation MX3. As well has been incredibly fun to drive and also practical (it had a rear hatch), it was practically indestructible. I literally spent no effort to maintain it. Additionally, Mazda (at the time) had the interesting idea of introducing cars a low price and then increasing the price every year. This kept the resale price high.

I suspect that historically Mazda made a mistake of pricing their cars too low. The Toyota Corolla appealed to NA buyers because it was seen as a "good" car. Mazda cars, in comparison, were seen as "cheap" cars.

I'm looking to buy a new car. How do you measure goodness of a model of car objectively?

You can't really measure it objectively because your reason for buying a car won't be someone else's reason. The most important question is "what are you using the car for?"

Most people don't need a car that's fun to drive, they need a car that is safe, reliable, seats X number of people (depending on family size, carpooling, etc.) gets them and their stuff from point A to point B consistently (differs if you ski, or are a contractor, etc.), and does it at a minimum annual cost once maintenance, gas, insurance, etc. are factored in.

If you drive for fun or race, then reliability isn't your biggest concern, and you probably don't care whether it has more than two seats or any semblance of trunk space. You're going to care mainly about performance metrics.

And then there's aesthetics - which again depends on how much you care about those things.

I'd say for new folks I highly recommend Doug Demuro's youtube channel. Unlike other car reviews that focus on the high end market, I like how he still focuses on extreme details around ergonomics to performance and look. It's the only rating system where I trust.

If you are look for value go with a Hyundai. And I'm not saying this because I'm Korean (or the fact that my birth city is known as Republic of Hyundai due to their reach into every economic sector) but it just doesn't make sense to pay for a Toyota or Honda badge when all the stuff Hyundai gives you included with base costs extra at other dealership. Especially now with the release of i30N (possibly coming to N.A.), built by the guys who brought you Audi and Lamborghini cars (basically an Audi), it's hard to shrug off Hyundai for the extra options and value they include for the base price of competitors. TLDR: You want to go from A to Z for the best bang for your buck.

Having said that, stay away from KIAs if possible. No Korean I know will ever defend it.

> I'd say for new folks I highly recommend Doug Demuro's youtube channel. Unlike other car reviews that focus on the high end market, I like how he still focuses on extreme details around ergonomics to performance and look.

Are you talking about this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqjHFMB_JYTaEnf_vmTNqg/vid...

I'm guessing not, since it seems to be almost entirely focused on the high end market. Does he have another channel or something? What am I missing?

My preferred channels are Alex on Autos[1] and sometimes saabkyle04[2]...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/TTACVideo/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/user/saabkyle04/

There are way too many factors for there to be any single objective way to measure quality of a vehicle.

Personally, I look for an aggressive appearance, good utility in bad weather, and (now) plenty of cargo space.

I'm less concerned about safety and reliability, though obviously I don't want to be driving a deathtrap with loads of maintenance costs. To sanity-check the latter, I look at https://www.carcomplaints.com/ .

Out of curiosity, what drives the "plenty of cargo space" requirement? We're a family with three kids and bought a 6-seat Mazda 5 this year as our only car, on the theory that it has almost no trunk space, but mostly we're just bombing around town doing grocery runs anyway.

In cases of cargo moving (dump dropoff, IKEA pickup, Home Depot), it's typically adult-only trips, so it's really just vacation that's the case where we need a full load of both passengers and cargo. Since vacation is only a few times a year, we figured we'd optimize for the common case and plan to rent a larger van for those instances if necessary, or look at other alternatives, such as a roof box, trailer, whatever.

For my fiancée and me, we need cargo space for two primary use cases: 1. short-distance hauling of large objects and/or numerous objects, and 2. road trips. It's the frequency of both that encourages the purchase of a large vehicle rather than the rental of one.

You don't. It is subjective, to your personal use-case.

The choice of values (what to measure) certainly has many subjective components. That said, a good chunk of people tend to value (to some degree or another): cost of ownership, reliability, fuel economy, performance, appearance, seating/cargo capacity, and resale value. Many of these criteria can be measured, more-or-less, in objective ways. Some criteria tend to vary more across individuals (such as appearance or driver "feel").

I mention this because if a person states their preferences across the attributes they value in a vehicle, it is quite feasible to have a detailed (if not "objective" then at least a rather neutral-point-of-view) discussion about the matching set of vehicles and what they offer across the dimensions.