Thanks everyone, for the thoughts and prayers. An 18 year old kid turned into her in an intersection so she came to a stop from a 30 mph or so in an instant- Beth never even got a chance to hit the brakes. The airbag did it's job, allowing her to walk away from it relatively intact (no broken face or crushed sternum/chest), although very beat up from the airbag, and being a mother and convincing the 18 yr old she was alright, it wasn't the end of the world and his mother would be happy he wasn't seriously hurt. Recovery time from the airbag injury is 4-6 weeks and she is at week 4. Coughing and sneezing in the beginning was debilitating, but now only hurts and doesn't backtrack her a day or 2 and she's much more mobile, although picking up and carrying any weight is still a little ways off.
Beth really liked the 2014 CX5 she had (a replacement for the Mazda 5 our oldest wrecked- she seems to be going through cars about every 2 years or so- you'll have to wait patiently for the next installment, as our youngest has just turned 16) so we're not complicating it with looking at anything else- moving a little newer to a 2016 and getting it in red (she settled for a silver one because it was such a clean, low mileage car) is the objective. We think we may have found THE ONE today.
@Michael Pickett- first and most important thing, Mike is to make sure the heads have a good 3 angle valve job. There are a couple of good threads on the Samba on porting stock heads- I'll have a look later. If you get to the point of unshrouding the valves you'll be adding cc's to the combustion chambers so the heads may need to be flycut to get the compression back up for maximimum benefit.
Hope this helps. Al