Depends on the make of minivan. Dodge Caravans are pretty bulletproof; Ford Windstars, not so much. Tell us you're getting a late model Grand Caravan, with the V6, that's been well maintained, and we shade tree mechanics of the bunny brigade will bless the endeavor. Otherwise, we're skeptical, but still listening...

And of course, there's that whole "bought it from family" vibe to deal with, if the transmission falls out in 10K miles.

Minivans are so much cooler than they used to be. Sleek, with the fancy buttons that open and close the doors. Hell, I'd drive a minivan.

Your neighbors would never suspect that you are really covert international spies.

Is it possible that she might feel some resentment about the fact that it's coming from your parents? As in, she feels they're interfering? Probably not, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I have very interfering in-laws so of course that was the first thing I thought of.

Putting myself in her situation is easy: my in-laws do own a mini-van that they tried to give us for free about 3 months ago. I found myself balking at driving something that they owned, but I have a whole pride/charity thing going on as far as my in-laws are concerned. I have two teenagers with licenses and neither of them wanted it either - they kept calling it the old people van and both said it was hard to drive and park.

I'm with your wife on this. I'm pretty crappy in larger vehicles & I'd hate to have to drive one. If I were her I'd be trying every trick in the book to get you not to have the minivan. "But darling, it'll make you look old."

I hate driving large cars so I can see your wife's point about the hugeness factor.

Plus there's a stigma attached to a minivan that for some of us is hard to overcome. I am on record as saying I will never own a minivan. Of course, I'm a single guy that doesn't haul kids around. If I did have kids, I might get a Passat or Volvo wagon. Uncool, yes, but the turbo can make it fun to drive.

Good luck.

Your neighbors would never suspect that you are really covert international spies.

Breaking my rule about not posting from work:

≡ Click to see image ≡

I've had to drive somebody's minivan after being used to my trusty little Nissan Sentra, and yeah, I felt like I had the conn of the USS Forrestal by comparison. Can't beat 'em for hauling kids and crap around, but if you do take the plunge, you might benefit from going somewhere empty where you can practice that parking.

I've had to learn to get along with a Ford Ranger and a Ford Windstar after being used to a Mazda 323 hatchback, and it *can* be done -- it's down to whether you want to get used to it.

I have to agree with seanyboy. Large vehicles feel less responsive; they make it more difficult to sense where "you" stop and surrounding traffic/objects starts; the gas tanks are huge and so they seem more expensive to fill with gas; they're harder to park as parking lots get smaller and more crowded. I'm not even that short and it's actually annoying for me to get in and out of tall vehicles in most of my clothes. They make me feel little and out of control and they make me feel like I'm part of the problem, driving my little self around in a huge vehicle.

In the end, a lot of people see their vehicle as something as personal as their haircut. You can't convince a person who doesn't want one to wear a perm, so you can't convince a person who doesn't want to drive a van (mini or not) to be enthusiastic about the idea.

Hi, I'm drezdn's wife. I just wanted to note that I'm not resentful of my in-laws (it's really very generous), concerned about the quality (anything is better than that old Sable), and I'm willing to learn to drive a big vehicle. It'll primarily be drezdn's vehicle, not mine, and it's our best option as far as getting another vehicle goes.

But man, that mommy-mobile vibe...ugh. That's really throwing me.

I'd love to be convinced that the minivan is the coolest vehicle on the road. If any of you can see a silver lining to driving a minivan, I'd love to hear it.

Maybe we should watch "Get Shorty."

Won't the minivan be yours, anyway? My parents each have a car, and they rarely switch (especially now that they're "empty nesters" and don't have their grubby kids around begging for cars).

Or watch the A-Team.

seanyboy, there's actually an a-team van look-a-like near where we live. I envy the person that owns it, especially if they have the box of AK-47s in the back with Mr. T as their driver.

The first car I drove was a Dodge Caravan, when I was a senior in high school. All my friends thought it was super cool because I could cart them around in it (my birthday came first so I was the first with a driver's license). Although I'm quite sure that the minivan won't carry quite the same cache with your friends in their late 20s, rest assured that some high school kids will be jealous. Especially those in a band.

Well, I regularly trade my Saab for use of my mom's Caravan - I borrowed it the 2nd day she had it. I can't fit most home improvement project supplies in mine (doors, decking, etc.) Maybe you could get friends with hot cars to swap for weekend projects? Rent it out for extra cash?

Could the silver lining be that it can be had for a "considerable discount?"

A minivan may not be the "coolest" vehicle on the road, but if you can have it without going into debt, that's very cool. Plus, you are a mommy. A vehicle does not make a woman.

I've driven my sister's Dodge Caravan some, and while it's no sportscar, neither is it particularly bad handling. Her van is the standard Caravan, with the 4 cylinder engine, so it's a bit anemic on highway power, but it gets 25 mpg on the highway and about 19 or 20 around town. It's hard on front tires, being that it's a front wheel drive vehicle, which does all of the power and steering on the front tires, and most of the braking too, so it really needs to have tires rotated regularly.

Driving and parking the thing have never seemed particularly problematic to me; there is good visibility all around, and since hers has the dual sliding doors, it's breeze getting in and out of the thing. The rear seat comes out, and with it in, there is decent seating for 7.

She does nothing to her cars, that isn't a no-drive crisis, and she's not killed it at the 155,000 mile mark. I take pity on her mules occasionally, and have basic service done, like timing belt changes and the occasional fluid change and tune up, but she drives her kids daily, and does nothing but put gas in it, otherwise. She showed up at my house once (after a 180 mile highway trip), with her kids in it, and I noticed her tires looked low. 11 psi in one front tire, 15 psi in the other. The girl will not listen to sermons about car maintenance, and I've quit preaching.

It'll be really cool to have a van, the first time moving 7 people as a group comes up. It'll be cool when you want to haul stuff. It'll be cool if you want to take a long trip with pets and lots of luggage.

It won't be cool, ever, if you don't let it be, on style points. It won't be cool if it takes major repairs. It won't be cool if you have to be unduly grateful forever, for getting a below market deal from family.

Hi, indigojones, welcome. I recommend going the Sin Bin route.

1. Take out the last row of seating and line the interior in hot pink shag...the floors and the walls and the ceiling.

2. Put a "If this van's a'rockin', don't come knockin'!" sticker on the back bumper.

3. Have the outside custom-painted. An airbrushed orgy scene would be awesome. Tastefully done, of course.

4. Put opaque curtains on every window.

5. Install a Beermeister in the back. You may have to take out even more seating but it's worth it.

6. Visually separate the back (where the magic happens) from the front, business end of the van by hanging colorful plastic beads as a divider.

You can thank me later ;)

The thing is, my wife feels the minivan will make us old

Old? OLD? Do "old" people drive around poppin' caps in motherfuckers' asses? I think NOT!

1
2
3
4

iconomy, ha!

I've thought of something else. Trips with friends! When my sister had a minivan we could load up all of the kids and head to Marineland! or St. Augustine! or the Mall at Millenia! Now that she doesn't have the van we don't drive to out of town places as much because it's no fun driving alone.

Get pinstriping.

≡ Click to see image ≡

I learned to drive in a minivan, which I later got (for free) from my parents. I used it to haul all my shit halfway across the country when I moved, then drove it for several years in Boston. I've also rented a few of them for other cross-country moves.

I would get a minivan again in a heartbeat. I loved knowing there was almost always room in the car for whatever shopping I had to do. I loved the visibility -- I find myself feeling a little out of control in most of the small cars I've driven because I can't see the cars around me as well when I look over my shoulder. Minivans are almost entirely windows. (I've rented big SUVs, and I did feel a bit out of control in them. Minivans, at least the ones I've driven, have much better handling / traction / something than that.)

I also think, really, that SUVs are what gives off the Mommy vibe. Or at least the "We don't actually want to look like parents, but we totally are" vibe. Minivans always seem like, "It's practical, we don't care what you think." In a good, confident sort of way. Like you're not trying too hard to be cool.

And for me, being able to say that I can successfully parallel park a minivan in Boston made me feel like a bad-ass. :)

Reading occhiblu's remarks, it's occurred to me that if I ever get around to buying a Klepper, a used minivan with the seats removed would be just about right for hauling the damn thing to the reservoir. The Sentra ain't gonna cut it.

As long as you can resist putting a bunch of skateboard or hardcore or hippie stickers on the back, minivans never seem to get pulled over by the cops.

They're pretty decent in crashes, decent for fuel economy, great for cargo, and often quite good for reliability (besides the Chrysler ones, Honda and Toyota also make a good minivan).

Like any car, they're not right for everybody, but choosing your second most expensive possession on the basis of fashion seems to me like a luxury that most people shouldn't be able to afford.

I had one and I more or less covered it with stickers, glued plastic snakes and dinosaurs and stuff all over the dashboard and interior and let the kids paint the ceiling and the walls and the seats until it was awesome. I hauled people and dogs and canoes and bikes and tents and all kind of stuff up and down the East Coast from South Carolina to Vermont and back again. That minivan went to the beach and the mountains, the East Village and the top of a mountain in West Virginia and people always enjoyed the movable art. It was all good, until it died stone dead at 110,000 miles, approximately 2 months after my last payment - do not get a late 80s Plymouth Voyager.

When I was going through similar throes several years ago, the most non-intentionally cutting remark came from a friend:

"Yes, minivans are very practical."

I'm with you, indigojones--avoid the mommy-mobile! Next, you'll be wearing mom jeans. You know, they're very practical, too.

When I was a teenager, very few of my friends had cars -- what's the point in a city with subways and hellacious parking? But a few people had vans, and that was fantastic and incredibly cool, because they were so useful for major undertakings involving, say, band equipment or huge art installations.

Again perhaps because of where I grew up, I never developed a sense of cars as personal statements; they're machines, for heaven's sake, not clothing. They all look pretty much alike to me, and the fact that people make all sorts of assumptions about "the kind of person who'd drive an xyz" just seems hilarious. But even so: if you're uptight about looking like a suburbanite or something, why don't you just paint something interesting on the van? Or invert box's advice and put stickers on the back.

my x and i had a grand caravan for years, throughout our mid-20's to early 30s. the long-wheelbase one. i parallel parked that fucker twice or 3x PER DAY on a narrow, hilly crowded streets in downtown cincinnati and around campus. it was one of the *easiest* vehicles i've had to drive. damned AWD subaru wagons with all their differentials, now THEY are tough to parallel park. make it a manual subaru with armstrong steering? fuck that noise, i'd take the minivan back any day.

minivans are bar none the best haulers-of-shit that can be had, and for what we were doing at the time (bike team managers and race promoters) the thing was indispensable, cheap to drive and cheap to maintain. you could NOT kill that sucker, i think we put somewhere just shy of 300k in it AND a friend of ours drove it from Denver to upstate Maine and back with all of HIS shit, too. people ALWAYS asked to go with us on road trips to bike races, cos you could fit six or seven people, all their crap, and all the bikes (we had a roof rack, rarely used it). and it was UNGODLY COMFORTABLE. and you can sleep fully stretched out in the back, stand up and change clothes without anyone seeing in (assuming heavy tint glass) and you can take the third row bench out and have a 'dodge loveseat' in your livingroom, or wherever else you want it.

oh all that plus you can drive 90 pretty much everywhere and cops will utterly ignore you.

plus all of what occhiblu said.

oh yea on preview of what mgl said: we pimped that sucker to the roof rails with bike team stickers. big custom ones.

I totally think that you could pimp out a minivan in much cooler ways than you can pimp out something "cute" like a Volkswagen Beetle or a Mini Cooper or a Rav4 or a Miata or one of the many, many cars I used to wish I owned rather than the hand-me-down cars I always had. However, that kind of pimpage might cost more money than you're saving, especially if you choose to do really cool things like installing a traveling cooler with soda dispenser.

If I can ask, where do you live? If it's a suburban or kinda metro area, I recommend that drezdn should drive the minivan and indigojones should get a modern scooter. Most scooters these days cost less than $2k, they're more fuel-efficient than a compact car (60 miles on 2 gallons of gas), you can also trick them out to include extra storage space for quick trips to the grocery store or to work, and you'll also get tied into a new scene. Before long, you may end up like my boyfriend who traded in his modern Vespa for a 1960s Lambretta and then bought two more vintage small frame Vespas to fix up.

This could be the beginning of a brand-new you!!

one word: hydraulics.

IF you do end up getting it I'd do what others suggest and seriously redecorate it somehow. I, personally wouldn't get one unless perhaps it was free or uber cheap (so maybe it's the best thing to do in your case), I drive one at work and gas mileage is seriously meh, 20/25, especially if it is used to ferry around one person most of the time, drivability is fine on dry roads, mediocre on anything else.
I can see how they serve a purpose, but for most people other options are better.

Completely gut the far back, leave the two seats in the immediate back, new paint, whatever else you need to do.

You could go on tour and/or solve crimes.
Make sure every time you slide open the van door it starts playing "Let's Get It On."

dang, MGL, I wonder if i saw your minivan of awesomeness at Myrtle Beach or Cherry Grove mumble years back? I vaguely remember seeing a van approximately that description that wife and MIL called "eyesore" and I called "too much fun on wheels." Was there a lot of electric chartreuse and Day-Glo purple and orange in the color scheme?

I second personalizing the minivan. If you put leopard-print seat covers or pink fuzzy mirror dice in it then it would look less like a mommy-mobile.

Let me get this straight. You're the guy, and you're trying to convince the gal to buy a minivan, and she's balking because it's boring?

This totally goes against everything that American advertising has been telling me for years.

Anyway, I'm with lonefrontranger -- the Chrysler minivans (they invented them, you know) are very near the top of the heap (the Honda Odyssey lately has seemed better, though). They handle much better than you think they will (like a sedan, only taller; it's what they are mechanically). They're great for car trips, camping, any other hauling situations like six kids to soccer practice.

If you really object to the minivan look, you can get a lot of the same functionality with some of the newer station wagons like the Subaru Forester or a wagon/SUV hybrid or any other car-based SUV, like the Toyota RAV4. If it's important to you there are options.

The mister and I currently have a '98 Jeep Cherokee and a '88 Chevy S10. We're going to be trading them in this year for something else (new or damn near) and a mini-van has been mentioned because of the practicality. There ain't nothin' wrong with being practical. We have three animals (and will have more sometime this year), we like to camp and fish, shop at Costco, hate paying delivery charges, we travel down to the Seattle area several times a year, up to Kamloops now and then and generally love road trips. A mini-van would be great with our lifestyle. And we don't, and won't have kids. So much for "mommy vans".

Also, as TrishaLynn mentioned, since we'll be down to one vehicle, we're talking about getting me a scooter of some sort. They don't cost much and we live in a fairly small town. It'd be great for getting me to doctor's appointments, running errands and the like. Wheeeee!

deborah: You rock on! I hope to take a motorcyclist's safety course this spring/summer so that I can ride around town on my boyfriend's spare bike and so that we can ride to/from scooter meetings in NYC together.

What kind of scooter did you want to get? Whatever I decide, it's got to be a small or short frame since I am only five-foot even.

The talk hasn't gotten that far along yet, TL. I don't want anything too big (I'm not all that tall either - 5'4") but it's got to be big enough to handle my less than dainty butt.

We'll probably get an electric something or other.

We have always had station wagons .. our last 4 cars. My wife wants a sedan, the next one but I identify as a station wagon person and am having trouble letting go of that. Plus, how would we haul all of our shit around?