I was checking out those same cars too. We saw a Cube on the side of the road on one of our bike rides and stopped to investigate. Neat looking!

Unfortunately, according to their website, the rear seat does not fold flat. That was a deal breaker for us.

The Kia Soul seems like a good option, but I've not looked at one up close in person before.

We currently drive a Toyota Matrix. We bought it 5 years ago because it was practical (and frankly, liked that it was a Toyota) and we have not been disappointed. We are just shy of 100K miles on it (we are tough on our cars!) and it still drives wonderfully. Except for the fact that it's dirty and full of dog hair right now, it still looks pretty good, too. Honestly, we have NO complaints - it's done everything we've asked of it (including a drive across the country carrying two dogs, 2 bikes and baggage) without issue. I put chains on it for our first snowy winter here (roads get REALLY bad because we don't have many plows) and it handled beautifully. Much better than I expected it to, actually!

I recently had the opportunity to drive a new Matrix (2010) while waiting for ours to be serviced for a day and it was nice. It doesn't have a back glass hatch like ours does (which we love when there are bikes on the rear rack) and the visability isn't as good (they changed the rear windows somewhat), but the interior is nice and it drove well. Personally though, if I were looking at a Matrix, I'd get a used one to get the features that we have.