Gadgetory

many of you saw my recent top 5 video of CNET's highest rated car in the last year and a lot of you wrote in and said that's great how about something I can afford coolly a BMW i8 isn't exactly in the budget I hear ya I'm Brian Cooley with a very different top 5 but along the same lines top 5 affordable cars as rated by scenic this is not an exhaustive list of the entire category but it covers cars reviewed by Cena in the last year that came in under 25 grand with destination charge and got really great scores from us that means at least four stars or an 8.0 with one exception you'll see you can find cheaper cars by the way but they don't hit the top scores that we give I figured you wanted the good stuff so let's go I'm gonna rank these based on that see net score but filtering in the MSRP to new ones it a bit number five the Ford Fiesta ST not quite an 8.0 score you'll notice but close enough to it for one of the hottest hatches on the market right now about 200 horsepower and 200 pound feet of torque from a little engine that delivers 26 35 mpg that's great and equipped with wheels suspension and torque vectoring that are all geared for the curves it's the cheapest way to show up at Auto cross and have the right gear number for the Mazda mx-5 you know it as the Miata easily the car that I would most want to drive on an ice road though not of course if that road leads to Costco the Miata just sneaks in under our price cut and even then it leaves out Bluetooth and USB unless you upgrade so buy some earbuds and realize you're in a great handling fun shifting happy revving open top icon for under 25 grand and bring something bigger to Costco number three is the Subaru Legacy even a bass legacy has their great symmetrical all-wheel drive that's a big plus and it's the only car on our list that has all the wheels driven Subaru is not normally a cabin tech leader to be diplomatic but their system gave us less to complain about than last year and they distracted us from its shortcomings with their quite nice optional eyesight technology that handles driver assist well and again comes in at a nice price point choose the Mini Cooper hardtop the classic mini now they have one less cylinder in the engine this generation but more power than they had with more cylinders the Mini connected infotainment platform is much improved now it taps much of the latest generation of BMW idrive design rather than tapping the first generation you either love the look of a mini or wish it's trite ode to the dot-com era would just go away but know that its iconic shape is now much roomier than it was last year before I get you to number one a couple cars I want to give an honorable mention to first of all you get the GMC Canyon it misses the cut on our score requirement by just a little bit but it's a real pickup in a small package that drives like a car and is far from the bottom in terms of cabin tech and I got to tip my hat of course to the VW GTI it missed the cut on cost by about 600 bucks but it scored a list topping 8.2 score thanks to great driving dynamics good cabin design and not bad technology our number one car on the list is so strongly the Mazda mazda3 it's the cheapest car on the list and it's the only one that got an editor's choice from our reviewers it's fun the drive has a choice of manual or automatic transmission you've got Pandora stitcher aha modern apps and the - even a little head-up display that pops up though it's a bit like something out of a cereal box still this is your bargain choice and knowing Mazda likely built to stay that way or top five lists to wait the car lever go to see net on cars comm click on top five you