On each At-A-Glance page, you'll see two things right under the year, make and model of the vehicle. The first is the Family Friendliness score, which distills a number of objective criteria.

Recommended lets you know if we think a vehicle is worth your money. Remember, just because a car has a high Family Friendliness ranking doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth having, and sometimes a vehicle that has a lower Family Friendliness score will be recommended for reasons we only find after driving it.

We can't recommend a car we haven't driven because it's impossible to get the full picture just from pictures and a list of the vehicle's dimensions. We need to get behind the wheel to fiind out if it's easy to put in a car seat, or if the interior is comfortable, or if we simply like driving it around. That's where our First Drives and Reviews come in. We write them after we've had a chance to drive a vehicle and really try it out to see how suitable it is to the unique demands of family life. If it works, we Recommend it. If not, we don't. Either way, we explain why.