Best Cars for Every Life Stage

That’s why we created these curated lists of the best vehicles for key life stages. For this guide, we combed through the hundreds of data points we collect on every vehicle we test, and—for the first time—ranked them according to the specific criteria we judged to be important for each milestone. So, for instance, there's “easy car-seat installation” for new families or “good visibility” for seniors. You’ll see a specially created score from 0 to 100 in each category for just this purpose.

Regardless of the life stage, all the cars listed here are CR recommended models and have high Overall Scores in their categories. That’s because we believe any vehicle you drive should be reliable, have key safety features, and get good fuel economy and performance for its class.