Well damn. The civic doesn’t have enough head room. I even tried and Accord and I still didn’t feel there was enough head room. I had to pull back the sunroof to get enough room.
I’m only 6’0", I don’t get what the deal is with head room at that height. That is only 1 SD above average for a guy.
The Mazda3 had already been sold.
I may need to upgrade to a midsize sedan if the compacts are going to have this head room problem.
Hyundai Elantra and it’s cousin the Kia Forte both have 100K warranties.
My son and his wife both have Elantra’s. My son says that the 100K warranty on his 2005 Elantra was a rip-off because nothing ever went wrong with the car! 
I have a 2007 Kia Spectra5 which was replaced by the Forte in the last couple of years. Very good car for me.
My youngest daughter bought a 2013 Kia Forte 5-door last year. Loves it.
My oldest daughter bought a 2010 Kia Soul. It’s got one of those styles and shape that you either love or hate. 98K miles on it and it’s still running fine.
I bought a new Hyundai Elantra last year and I love it. Great gas mileage, reasonable price, (allowed me to afford lots of bells and whistles), drives great, looks sharp.
Does anyone have any ‘proof’ (meaning articles, studies, reliability studies, etc) showing the Kias have gone up in quality? Like I said, the reason I ask is because I know back in the late 90s Kias were not too good. I know they are partly owned by Hyundai and Hyundai has seen a lot of quality improvement (a woman I know has an accent, abuses the hell out of it and it got to 140k miles with very few problems).
If Kias are at the same quality level as hyundai I’d gladly look into them. They are fairly inexpensive. I’m just wary about the brand Kia.
My next car will probably be a Hyundai Elantra - as far as I can tell, they fit all your criteria, plus a very long warranty.
I know you’ve said you don’t like the Corolla, but I have a 2005 Corolla that is rock-solid. Have you tried one on? I didn’t love the car until I tried driving it - it is a very nice drive, in my opinion. It also makes a difference if you’re driving a manual or automatic - I recently had a rental automatic Corolla, and I wouldn’t buy one. The standard is much more peppy than the automatic.
Hyundai owns Kia.
If it’s data you want, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend the $7 (IIRC) to sign up for a month of online access to Consumer Reports. Used car reliability rating is definitely an imprecise science, but CR’s are generally considered to be fairly good.
With Kia vs. Hyundai, the ultimate goal of the Hyundai group is to make Hyundai into a traditional mainstream brand like Honda, Toyota, etc. and leave their previous niche selling super cheap basic cars to Kia. Kia’s reliability has improved along with Hyundai’s, but hasn’t followed the huge strives Hyundai has made in performance, material quality, etc. But they are cheap and newer ones are reasonably reliable, so if you test drive one and aren’t completely repulsed it could be a possibility.
Yep. They are like the Korean version of Buick and Chevy. The engine, transmission, and even much of the frame looks the same in my daughter-in-law’s Elantra as my Kia Spectra5.
Hyundai often gets newer technology, such as engines and transmissions, a year or so in advance of Kia. On the other hand Kia got something like the Soul which Hyundai doesn’t have. Of course the Soul is built on similar underpinnings as the Rio/Accent.
Years ago both Kia and Hyundai were cheap, crappy cars. However the company had a major turnaround a few years ago. Basically the president of Hyundai said that we are putting a 100K warranty on the cars and you better build them so we really don’t need to fix anything in that time period.
The Consumer Reports reliability ratings are based on a survey of their readership, which is in the millions. I think it’s fairly reliable.
This is cheap, never breaks down, does 100 miles to the gallon of mead and only costs 2s 6d per day to run!
I liked the Sonata. It is about 30mpg on the highway, ample headroom, comfortable inside and not too expensive (an 05-06 can be had for 6k or so if you shop around).
