Toyota RAV4 overtakes the Ford F-150 as the best selling in the US.

If by “stick time,” you mean stick shift/manual transmission, then, yes, I really miss those. Our Ford was stick shift; it was so much fun to drive despte being a sedan, but. . . .

Our Ford developed electrical issues, some due to battery acid leaking on wiring and wire looms cracking due to age, exposing wires to heat and friction. Furthermore, in the 10-days since failing, the Ford has been sitting on the side of our driveway, and a rat or a mouse has already moved into the engine bay.

 

gen 4 over the last 10 years has been pretty reliable, def better than gen 3

 

I've owned sportbikes, sedans, hatches, and vans -- defo prefer hatches as my cage, as do most families who don't have giant parking spaces nor tolerance for crap mpg. Hot hatches were not a game-changer in their time for nothing (still are in EU and Asia, at least for younger buyers).

Since crossies are so much more profitable (whilst making you spend more for higher weight and consumables costs like fuel, tires and shocks / struts due to it), hatches have been disappearing from larger mfr swimlanes a while now -- Ford stopped making all its car lines for entirely profit-related reasons, save the Mustang (yep, technically a hatch too, if not exactly utilitarian). So was happy the 5G was a true hatch -- even if the concept were heavily compromised vs. 4G.

Lived with a little Paseo rollerskate (not a hatch, btw) over 15y -- and got thru life just fine, g/fs occasionally inhabiting the right seat. Buying my first new car (turbo Honda Civic), had to be a hatch -- one thing that Honda were actually good at, was being a warm hatch (tho lots of past hot Civics were much better at space utilisation than 10th-gen).

Funny thing about 'liftback' -- that's what Corolla hatches were called in the '70s -- so really, they've brought the term back Does sort of make me laugh the concept of 5D being rebranded as a new thing If Toyota would wise up and offer the HyCam as a hatch or better yet, sell their wagon / estate models here as the only variant... no need for the lukewarmly-received-and-defo-overpriced Crown, maybe?

Tbh, unless you have a garden allotment somewhere, or are trying to build a new wall around your property every year... a HyCam can easily do a 4-person family's clean hauling like moving, then pivot to a U-Haul for the big / dirty stuff. Moved houses 3x like this during the Paseo years... works fine for me, and don't have to be penalised for 16 mpg every other day I'm not hauling something big or filthy, in a truck bed.

Low ride height's never bothered me, after riding a motorcycle 21 yrs -- some of it thru storms hundreds of miles wide. I gauge my youth on the ability to climb into a car w/o b*tching about it, by doing it I guess. But may not feel that way, when up in years where some of us here are