Hi all,
So I just bought the wife a Rav4. We needed to upgrade the family VW Passat sedan as we have a 2nd kid on the way and we needed a bit more space. I wanted a Passat Wagon, but the wife wanted an SUV. I narrowed it down to either a Mitsubishi Outlander or the Rav4 as the best small SUV's that still had quite a lot of space in the back (the Subaru Forester / VW Tiguan were too small). We wanted a ~2008 model in order to get a good price (a top spec Rav4 or Outlander is $50,000+ new).
In the end I chose the Rav4. The Outlander has a better transmission, it's 6 speed auto with paddle shifters is fun. It also has a trip meter. But the Rav4 seemed to be a better build quality (the outlanders didn't look so good for 3 yr old vehicles), more power, cheaper 17" tyres and dual zone climate control.
So Saturday we picked up a 2008 MY08 Rav4. It is a ZR6 V6 model with lots of nice features. In Flint Mica paint (although the sales brochure seems to call it Storm Grey, the 1E0 paint code disagrees). It's our first Toyota, hopefully it's one of the good ones!