"I hope it's not the image factor, because you'll be paying about $8K plus gas money for an image."

I wouldn't be the first would I?

I can say abolutly without question that the minivan thing is a "coolness" factor for my wife, and being as its her car I'd have to have a pretty good reason to tell her "No." I'm sure my next car will have at least 8K poured into "coolness" (because I could buy a nice little Saturn that gets me to work for around 15K) so I don't need to tell her she can't do the same. Face it, the reason we buy the cars we do is mostly for the "coolness", otherwise there would be about five different kinds of vehicle on the road and we'd all drive the same thing (empeg's firmly intact).