SUV, hatchback or estate: choosing a body style that fits your life

A body style is a container. It decides how much goes in the car, how easily it goes in, and whether the car fits the space where it lives. The badge, the trim and the shape of the lights are decoration on a decision you have already made.

So answer two questions before you look at a single model. What do you load into a car most weeks, and where does it park every day when you are not thinking about it? Those two answers rule out more cars than budget does, for reasons you cannot negotiate with.

The once-a-year load is a separate problem with a separate answer: a roof bar, a tow bar, or a hired van for a day. Buying half a metre of extra car for one weekend in August is the most common way to spend money on a problem you do not have. Work out the weekly load first .

This catalogue holds 101 cars: 51 SUVs, 31 hatchbacks, 9 estates, 4 saloons, 3 MPVs, 2 vans and a single roadster. Half the list is one body style.

That is a fact about what is built and sold, not about what suits you. Estates have not become worse at carrying things and hatchbacks have not become worse at cities. There are simply fewer of them on the shelf. When you notice that most of the cars you are shown are SUVs, you are noticing the supply.

A thin shelf makes a good answer harder to find rather than wrong. If an estate suits you, there are nine here to look at instead of fifty-one. The finder does not weight by body style — it ranks on what you carry and where you drive — so a car that fits surfaces even when it is outnumbered five to one.

Three of the arguments for an SUV are real and worth paying for. The rest are habit.

• Ground clearance. In this catalogue it runs from 120 mm to 291 mm. That span of 171 mm is the difference between a car that grounds on a rutted track, a steep ramp or unploughed snow and one that drives over it. If your route includes any of those regularly, clearance decides whether you get through.
• Getting in and out. An SUV seat is higher off the ground, so you slide across into it rather than dropping down and climbing back out. For stiff knees, hips or backs, and for strapping a child in without bending double, that is the difference between a car that gets used and one that gets avoided.
• Towing. Braked limits here run from 0 to 3,500 kg with a median of 1,300 kg, and the big numbers sit on heavier, stronger vehicles, because a towing limit is set by structure, cooling and kerb weight rather than by power. Tow anything substantial and the list narrows fast. Towing has its own guide .

The fourth argument — that you sit higher and see more — holds for the view forward and much less well behind and to the sides, where a high waistline and thick pillars take back what the height gave. It is also self-cancelling: the more drivers who sit high, the less any one of them sees past the others.

Height is not free, and the bill arrives in four places.

Aerodynamic drag rises with frontal area and with the square of speed. A taller car pushes a bigger hole in the air, and at motorway speed that hole is most of the work the engine is doing. Take one platform, raise it and square off the roof, and motorway consumption goes up although the engine never changed.

Mass follows the height. Ride height wants longer suspension travel, larger wheels and more structure, and every kilogram has to be accelerated at each set of lights, carried up each hill and brought to a stop at each junction. In an electric car that comes straight off the range.

Then the centre of gravity. A taller body carries more of its mass higher up, so it leans more in a corner and moves more load onto the outside tyres. Engineers answer that with stiffer springs and thicker anti-roll bars, which is why a firm-riding SUV is so common: the ride is paying for the height.

And length. Cars here run from 3,595 mm to 5,018 mm, so 1.4 m separates the shortest from the longest, and length is what you meet daily in a multi-storey and in a parallel space. This catalogue records length and not width, so measure the width yourself if your space is tight — including mirrors, and including how far the doors must swing before anyone gets out.

An estate is a hatchback with the roofline carried straight to the back of the car. That geometry gives a load bay that is long, square and low: a flat floor, a load lip nearer knee height than hip height, and a roof that does not slope away exactly where the suitcase wants to be.

Against an SUV the estate often loses on the headline litre figure and wins on the litres you can use. Seats-down volume is normally measured with the bay filled to the roof, which rewards a tall box over a long one, although nobody stacks a boot to the headlining and still expects to see out of the back window. The estate wins again on the part that hurts your back: lifting a heavy thing 20 cm rather than 40 cm, and sliding it in rather than lowering it. What a litre figure does and does not tell you is worth reading before you compare two numbers from two brands.

The estate pays for that in length — it is a long car for the interior it gives you — and in choice, with nine here against fifty-one SUVs.

The hatchback is the default for good reasons. Thirty-one of the cars here are hatchbacks, they populate the short end of that length range, and short is what makes a car easy to park, cheap to move and cheap to stop. If what you carry fits, a hatchback does the same journeys on less fuel and less tyre. The honest test is not whether it would cope with your worst day of the year, but whether it copes with your normal week.

1. 1

   Load the boot you already have

   Put your real weekly load into your current car, or a borrowed one, and photograph it. That photograph is your specification. Guessing at litres is how people end up two sizes too big.

2. 2

   Measure the space at home

   Length, width and the swing of the doors, at the place you park every night rather than the one you use on Saturdays. Write the maximum length down and treat it as a hard limit. Bay sizes vary from country to country, so measure the bays you use rather than trusting a standard.

3. 3

   Decide whether clearance is a real need

   An unsealed lane, a steep ramp, deep snow, a rutted track to the house: real. A high kerb once a month: not. Clearance here spans 120 to 291 mm, and you need the top of that range only if the ground demands it. Driven wheels are a separate question — see do you need all-wheel drive .

4. 4

   Price the height, not just the car

   Compare running costs across your shortlist rather than purchase prices alone. Running cost here spans €72 to €265 a month with a median of €195, and the shape of the car is one of the things driving that spread. What a car costs to run takes the figure apart.

5. 5

   Drive the last two loaded

   Take the child seat, the pushchair or the dog crate to the test drive and fit them. A boot that swallows the bags but not the pushchair is the wrong boot, and the car park is where you find that out.