Ultimately Scenics and Picassos were less available here in the Netherlands, and tended towards extraordinarily high mileage, which they don’t wear well. They also were mostly petrol-engined cars, which the French don’t have a wonderful reputation for. My wife was not enamored with the Italians like I was, so we ended up with the A-class. Much to my wife’s joy, an automatic to boot.

What never was added to this post was the discovery that the road tax here in Holland penalizes diesels very heavily, making them justifiable only with high yearly mileage (upwards of 15-18k km), something we’re unlikely to hit in this EasyJet world. It altered my searches significantly and made calculating ownership costs much trickier than I’d expected.

I do have a half-finished post written to outline the process and discuss my reasons. Hope you’ll be back to read it.

And thanks for the comment! Don’t get many of them with the Twitterverse so accesible to readers.

Matt