With these fun-to-drive cars that are also practical, you can hit the town on Saturday night and take your kids to soccer practice on Monday without having to swap rides. These are cars with some flair that you can enjoy driving yet still feel good about owning.
Here are seven fun cars that you won't be embarrassed to park in your driveway, provide better-than-average reliability, scored well in crash tests, are inexpensive to insure and deliver 30 mpg or better for highway driving, as estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The one category in our scoring that isn't a constant is the insurance cost. Getting a fix on comparative average annual premiums isn't an exact science, and the numbers vary from one reporting site to the next. Mining a number of websites, we set the national average annual premium for all cars at $1,600. Every car on this list has a national annual premium of $1,450 or less.
Additionally, a fun car had to score well in frontal and side-impact crash tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In its testing, "good" is the top score. Every car on this list earned a "good" for both measures.
All prices quoted are the manufacturer's suggested retail price plus the destination charge. Fuel economy is based on EPA estimates.