Just before christmas I finally managed to get the old Subaru Outback all fixed up and shiny ready to sell. Dealers weren’t offering much but it sold within a week on carsales.com.au for a decent price. This was to a couple at the North coast, after a few others had called about it and several had had a test drive. The process was actually pretty painless!

So the next day I went car-hunting at dealers in Brisbane who had the cars I was interested in. I’d done my research, and decided I wanted

• a smaller car – obvious, the Outback was just massive and not really necesary;
• second hand – couple of years old, good safety features but not paying for the “new”;
• good fuel economy;
• something with less environmental impact… this lead me to diesel, because you can run cars on 100% biodiesel which means it’s no longer dependent on fossil resources at all. Hybrids generally use petrol, and with 100% electric (which is unaffordable as yet) it depends on the electricity source;
• price below $20k. That was a bit more than I got for the Outback, but within decent range of what I could pay cash (I don’t borrow for this kind of expenditure – if I can’t afford it, I wouldn’t buy it) and also realistic in terms of finding something within budget.

With the diesel option, the choice was actually severely limited for the simple fact that most small cars just don’t come in a diesel variant. For instance, the Toyota Yaris has fantastic specs and fuel economy, but no diesel (at least not in Australia). Mazda 2 is great but again no diesel. Serious fail, dear AU car manufacturers/distributors!

The few I did find were Volkswagen Polo (tiny), Volkswagen Golf (expensive), and the like. However, someone pointed out the Hyundai i30 to me. I’d been disregarding Hyundai because the Excel is known as a “crumplezone” – bad safety. But the i30 is of a whole new generation, you can tell they’ve been looking at the design of Opel, Mazda, Volkswagen, Ford… the 2008+ models have a 5 star ANCAP (safety) rating which is top-notch. I hadn’t driven one yet, but at the first testdrive I was sold. Very nice. So, within a day I had a “new” car – I don’t mess about! ;-)

I’m still re-adjusting to the manual gears (the Outback was an automatic) but I’d learnt in manuals so fundamentally I do know how to do it and my license allows. More on the diesel and fuel economy in a following post.