Toyota Yaris L 5-dr 2014

College is figuratively staring me in the face at this point, even though it's more in-your-face to ALL OF MY FRIENDS BECAUSE THEY ALL START A WEEK BEFORE I DO. Ahem. And I want to talk about cars. A Top Gear thing is premiering Monday (very excited for that) and so I've been trying to watch some of that on top of trying to watch Doctor Who. Let's just say that that's been very... complicated. Anywho, I love hatchbacks. Big, small, in between (I'm looking at you, crossovers). I just think they are the most adorable things ever. I know that part of that is my experience with my aunt's SUV. I have some good memories of that car, along with some...not so good ones. I actually would much like to get either a Hyundai Tucson or Santa Fe. Thinking maybe the Santa Fe because it's bigger. Or the Santa Fe SE, which is bigger than the Tucson and smaller than the Santa Fe.
But as you can see, that car (and I love that color on cars) shown above is not a Santa Fe. It's not even a Hyundai. That, friends, is a Toyota Yaris. And the reason why I want to talk about this rather plain, ordinary car is because I'm going to college. See, I'm going to be inheriting my grandpa's red Geo Metro. I love that little bugger. I really do. It reminds me of an old race horse. It does what you want it to, it just takes longer to do it and it can't go as fast as it used to. But it does try to please. The only problem with it is it doesn't like to go above 65 mph. Well, I say doesn't like to. I amend that statement to can't really go above 65 mph and can't maintain that speed for longer than about an hour. So as much as I love the Metro, I'm going to have to eventually obtain something that can go freeway speeds so that it doesn't take me two days to go down to LA when my life takes me there.
Now, I'm going to bring up Top Gear briefly. The blokes on the BBC version (the good one) maintain that the Yaris is the car you want for a small, compact car. Good car, great mpg's, and fairly cheap. Perfect for a college student, yes? Have some stats. The 2014 Yaris has 37 highway mpg. It's got a GRAND total of..! 106 horsepower. Compared to some of the stuff I've posted up here, that seems almost laughable. To add to the laughing comparison, it's got a buzzy 1.5, straight 4 engine. That one up there is the 5-door L edition. Which means it's an automatic (and also apparently dated). The 3-door L has manual transmission, which is apparently better than the automatic. I'm totally cool with that anyway because I like stick shifts better than automatics. And all the reviews say that the manual is far better than the automatic. Which means that to get the good one, you're stuck with the 3-door or the most expensive 5-door. The SE gives better handling and stuff so you'd probably want to go with that one anyway. It's still under $20,000.
So, yeah. That's the car I'm looking at for my upgrade when I start travelling. You can get cheap used ones of previous years. You just have to know how to look.