Though the competition has heated up, we feel that the new Dodge Caravan is still one of the best minivans you can buy. It offers all of the creature comforts in a pleasing package at a fair price. Our other Best Buy is the Honda Odyssey. It's a little bit smaller than the Dodge, but more sporty to drive, and it has a super-convenient flip-and-fold-away rear seat.

Trailing at a close second are the Recommended Chevy Venture, Ford Windstar, and Toyota Sienna. Though these vans are comparably priced and offer loads of neat features, we feel they can't match the road manners of our two Best Buys. Also garnering Recommended ratings are the Chrysler Town & Country and Chrysler Voyager. Though they are mechanically similar to the class-leading Caravan, they don't offer the breadth of model choices.

Quest became a lame duck in June 2000 with the announced early end of the Nissan/Ford minivan joint venture. Despite that, Quest sales held up surprisingly well, declining a modest 3.9 percent for the calendar year to 42,800. The related Mercury Villager fared far worse, plunging 33 percent for the period. Though the death notice came too late for Nissan to abort a facelift and other planned changes for the 2001 Quest, it's unclear now whether the company will offer any 2002 models as originally announced.

Nissan has confirmed that it will be fielding a new minivan, though when and of what sort have yet to be determined. Some educated industry guesstimators think it will larger and more powerful than Quest, and likely to be sourced from Japan, though Nissan might shift production to its new Mississippi plant, now under construction, should sales demand prove strong enough. That new factory puts a question mark over timing. If Nissan waits until the plant is up and running, the minivan wouldn't show until model-year 2005. On the other hand, it could be in showrooms as early as 2003, assuming designers, engineers and manufacturing staff in Japan can move fast enough to meet that deadline. We'll know more soon, so keep checking back here for the latest information as it becomes available.