re: Car advice... Thinking about a Nissan Rogue

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But the Mazda CX-5 is a great similar sized vehicle that you may want to also look at.

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I'm going to look at that on Monday. Some suggested the Honda. But the Honda place is almost an hour drive from my house. I want to keep things in Bossier. We have plenty of dealerships next door to my gym.

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I'm going to look at that on Monday. Some suggested the Honda. But the Honda place is almost an hour drive from my house. I want to keep things in Bossier.

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Hey...now we are getting somewhere...

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No gears to shift. Continuous variable transmission (CVT).

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Back in the day, like the 1960s, we called that Automatic Transmission. No gears to shift. What's the difference?

The Continuously Variable Transmission is basically a type of automatic transmission. Without driving the vehicle and just looking at the gear lever you will notice that is exactly the same as a conventional automatic and it does the same thing as the an automatic which is convert the engine's limited range of speed to various ratios automatically to be sent to the driven wheels using a number of different gears.
This difference between the automatic transmission and CVT is the number of gears. The automatic is limited to 4 to 8 gear ratios and there are definite or noticable changes between the gears and this is felt during driving.
This transmission has what is termed an infinite number of ratios ranging from low to high and the transmission move through the gears steeplessly according to the driving situation.
Even though the term infinite is used, the lowest ratio will be close to the first gear in an automatic transmission and the highest ratio will be close to the highest gear in a regular transmission.

I just bought a 2013 for my daughter based on

* EXCELLENT reliability ratings from consumer reports
* significant price difference from Honda/Toyota with same/higher reliability

It rides and drives MUCH better than her old RAV4. The variable transmission is definitely unusual, but fine.

The only issues CR had with it was blind spots in rear viewing due to small rear window and large quarter panel columns, which is why the rear-view camera is important on this car.

I'm thinking about buying another for my other daughter.

BTW, while other posters are correct in that the Subaru Forester is a hippie/dike type car (which CR confirmed), it was rated far above all others. The Honda, Toyota, Nissan etc were all recommended and rated at about 73-75, but the Forester was rated 86.

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Generally I despise Shreveport/Bossier dealerships (Holmes Honda adds a $795 paint protection to their CRV's; Rountree Ford has never heard of the internet), but Moffitt Mazda is downright pleasant to deal with. I nearly bought one from them but went with a used Lexus instead.

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My experiences have been exactly the same. But all of my bad experiences were in Shreveport... Honda and Ford. Mazda and Lexus are here in Bossier as well as Nissan and Toyota. I don't want to deal with anyone in Shreveport.