Top 10 cars for summer

8. Ford Flex

Danny Moloshok/Reuters/File
The 2013 Ford Flex, seen here at the LA Auto Show in Los Angeles this past November, is a solid people mover with more street cred than a minivan.

Not everyone can live with just four seats. For those who want to haul a few more kids, friends, or beach toys, the Ford Flex is a solid-looking people mover with more street cred than a minivan and more economy than an SUV. A modern rendition of a 1950s Woody Wagon with an almost Range Rover-esque face, the Flex comes off as a modern classic with heaps of utility.

The suggested retail price starts at just over $30,000 with the top-of-the-line spec coming in around $40,000. Fuel economy doesn’t seem great at 20 m.p.g. in mixed conditions, but considering you get seating for seven plus 20 cubic feet of cargo space (much more when you start folding down seats) it’s quite reasonable.

I love the different-color-roof option and sweeping chrome bars, but for those who really want to embrace “The Endless Summer” motif, a $900 “Woody” styling kit is available and apparently installable by the home enthusiast.

8 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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