Is your third in a car seat? If so, that makes a big difference. We headed down to Town North Mazda a few weeks ago, because my wife is feeling frumpy in the MPV. I loved the Mazda3 (which a new one is in your price range) but when we tried to put the car seat in, we quickly moved on. Believe it or not, the RX-8 is the friendliest car for car seats that we have tried. We backed away from that when we thought about road trip space.