Recently my wife, Rita, and I decided to start looking for a new car. It isn’t that anything is wrong with our old car, but we think we want an SUV instead of the sedan we are driving. Our Toyota car is seven years old, has 90,000 miles on it, and has nothing wrong with it that a $9 car wash won’t fix. We do regular maintenance, have replaced one set of tires, but it rides comfortably and gets great gas mileage.

So, why do we want to buy another vehicle? It’s complicated!

We try to be savvy when we buy vehicles, even though we realize that there is no way a consumer can come out ahead of the g...