Best family cars 2025: top choices for you and your children

Welcome to the toughest test in the business – naming the best family car. You see, these cars really do have to do it all. They need to be spacious enough for you and your family to travel long distances in comfort, as well as being powerful enough to cope with faster roads as well as stop-start urban driving. Plus, they need to be comfortable, frugal, and come with all the latest technology you'll want to make the business of driving easier.

While there are many different types of car which you might say make for good family transport, here we're focussing on the traditional family hatchback – although, if you'd rather choose a family SUV, we've covered the best and worst options in a separate story.

Family cars come at plenty of different price points, and with a variety of power sources. So whether you're looking to go electric or plug-in hybrid with your next family car, or would rather stick with regular hybrid or purely combustion power, the chances are that there'll be a family car here to take your fancy.

To find the best family cars, our experienced team of road testers have spent thousands of hours behind the wheel of each one, driving them both on public roads, and back-to-back against key rivals at our private test track.

The result of all that testing is the list you see here, where we've named the 10 best family cars on sale today – remember that if any of them take your fancy, you can click the links through to our in-depth reviews to learn more about each model, or see the latest discounts using our new family car deals pages.

We've also named the family car which we think you should avoid, and answered some of the most commonly asked questions about running a family car at the bottom of this page.

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