Can you extend your lease? Given used prices at the moment, that might make sense.

Otherwise, it depends how far you want to get into it. You could have lots of fun shortlisting, visiting private buyers, test driving etc or you could go up to Car Giant and buy the Nissan Note they've got for £5.5k and be done with it.

There is a car chooser on the homepage, but it's somewhat limited. I don't think you can replace individual thoughts and experience. The answers given are always the same because a lot of people only quote budget, and sometimes size. That will always default advice to something reliable and reasonable value. I think the key to it being a more interesting question is for people to give some detail on what they actually want. A few have done that, and got a much wider variety of answers.

I've always found the Search facility a bit 'hit and miss' regarding what it returns. One possibility might be a Sticky thread but there are some disadvantages - off the top of my head:

The stickies have historically been used for announcements. Also about a year ago I pruned them and merged them as some members commented there were too many and it was a bit of a problem on their smartphones. I wouldn't know, I only browse the site on my laptop.

Stickies are read-only and members have opposing experiences which is good but read-only doesn't allow for discussion that.

We need to be sure any recommendations are the suggestions/opinions of the member(s), not some kind of HJ endorsement.

I'm not sure many look at the sticky threads judging by the low view rate.

A possible solution is we could start to keep a list of useful links to these threads in the private mod forum, then they can be copied over to the public thread as appropriate. That's the best I can think of.