Best Family Cars in 2014

Finding the best family car means more than just counting seatbelts and cup holders. Even what qualifies as a “family car” isn’t so clear cut these days. Minivans are an obvious choice, but not if you don’t need all that space. SUVs are great, but that extra cargo room’s a waste if you don’t use it. Then there’s the good ol’ family sedan: Would you like that in regular midsize, or upgrade to full-size? On the flip side, just because something’s big on the outside doesn’t mean it’s useful for families inside. So we had our work cut out for us when we decided to identify the Best Family Cars available in America for 2014.

Happily, we had a good place to start. Based on our Expert Ratings of all the vehicles – more than 300 of them – that we test each year, we gathered the 21 vehicles from across classes we believed had the stuff to be top-shelf family haulers. The selection of the 21 was a rigorous process itself.  Each of our nine editors received a list of candidates, then individually voted for up to 20 of them, and they were given the opportunity to nominate any additional vehicles that they felt should be included. We culled the responses, tallied the votes, and the vehicles that received four or more votes were invited to participate in our driving-and-usability test. We requested mainstream models from each manufacturer for our test, and most complied, although we did receive a few fully loaded exceptions.  We were careful not to give added advantages to those heavily equipped vehicles, because we wanted the test to be as “real-world” representative as possible.

The resulting list included seven sedans, six small SUVs, five midsize SUVs, two minivans, and one hybrid wagon, from a total of 11 different brands. With these all on premises at our Kelley Blue Book offices our staff installed and uninstalled car seats, loaded up the cargo area with various objects, and even brought their kids down to climb in and out, and maybe test out the rear-seat entertainment. When we were done, we tallied up our results, compared notes, and picked what we thought were the best of the bunch.