Do Americans want cheap, efficient cars?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sorry for the long set-up…

When I commute, I often see a sign off the freeway that reads: ‘GOT 50 MPG?’ It’s for Jeff’s Geo Metro, which specialises in maintaining, restoring, and modifying Chevrolet Sprint/Sprint Metros, Geo Metros, and Suzuki Swift. I drove a couple of Sprints for a while, so the sign catches my attention.

I think my dad paid $5,000 for a brand-new 1985 Chevrolet Sprint with air conditioning. I recall that seeming a lot of money for such a small car, but less expensive than the cheapest Toyota. The big draw, of course, was that it was claimed to achieve 50 miles per gallon. And it did, too.

Sometimes I called the Sprint a CARDIS, because it seemed smaller on the outside than it did on the inside. It had all the space I needed. (Oh – I borrowed dad’s occasionally, and bought a slightly-used '88 Sprint Metro from him that he got somewhere.) Driving up to Wrightwood to go skiing, the lightweight Sprint easily made it up the snow-covered road without chains. (I had chains, but wanted to see how high I could get without them.) In L.A. city driving, it was very ‘zippy’. I had to laugh when I gave a neighbour and her son a ride. She drives (still) a 1970 VW Bug; and compared to it, the Sprint was very quick. And the fuel efficiency was phenomenal.

It had its downsides. There’s a long hill around Vasquez Rocks, on the way from my place in L.A. to my dad’s place in Lancaster. I had to start it at 70 mph to maintain a decent speed at the top. Slower than that, and it might slow to 50 mph. (Mind, the speed limit was 55 mph at the time.) With a one-litre engine, dad complained that any hill was a chore when the air conditioning was turned on. Fortunately, the desert is flat. But he still felt the lack of power when he was using the a/c.

The controls were rudimentary. For example, there was a button on the dashboard to turn the headlights on, and a separate button to turn them off. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it was just cheaper than pulling an on/off switch off the shelf.

And then there was safety. Dad suffered TBI and his passenger was killed when the car hydroplaned and hit a bridge abutment. There’s not much metal there, and there were no air bags.

Having said all of that, the Sprint/Metro was a cheap car that got a lot of miles to the gallon and people liked them. Heck, I almost bought a used one nearly a decade ago because the Cherokee only gets 20 mpg. I’ve seen a couple/few Sprints on my commute, and that got me to thinking about them. Today I drive a Prius.

The Prius gets great mileage. I can make 50 mpg in my 2005, and in 5-1/2 years in the one I just wrecked I averaged 46.35 mpg. And I get this mileage at 70 mpg. The Sprint made its mileage at 60. I doubt it would at today’s speed limits. The Prius is larger, more comfortable, safer, faster, and is loaded with gadgets. But they aren’t cheap.

According to Fuelly-dot-com, the Toyota Yaris gets about 35 mpg and costs around $14,370 to $17,280. (Interestingly, older models get better mileage.) The Honda Fit gets about 33 mpg and costs around $15,425 to $19,790. The VW Jetta gets 37 mpg or so, and costs around $16,720 to $31,445. You just don’t see too many gasoline-fuelled cars that get 50 mpg like the Sprint did. Adjusting for inflation, I’m guessing the base MSRP is still higher than the Sprint’s was.

In Europe, Diesel is very popular. Here, not so much. Also, the U.S. seems to be pretty spread out. Nearly all of my experience is in the West, and there are a lot of miles that need to be traversed. Americans want to travel those miles quickly and in comfort. It seems that we want power more than fuel economy. Those of us who want fuel economy tend to pay for it. I could probably have gotten a less-efficient car for half the price of the Prius. Many of the new cars I see on the road are ‘modern muscle cars’ like the Dodge Challenger and Charger. When I was at the Toyota dealer, most of their featured vehicles got 15 to 30 mpg.

And yet… I see a lot of Smart cars. These cars get fewer miles per gallon than the old Chevy Sprint, but about as much as the Geo Metro. (The Geos had a different, fuel-injected, engine that was not as fuel efficient as the carburetted models.) Like the Sprint, they have 1.0 l, three-cylinder engines; and the base model’s MSRP is about $12,500. Without looking up the inflation difference, I think this is not much more than a Sprint. But they are smaller and have less utility than the Sprint. Probably safer, though.

So…

In My Humble Opinion, Americans generally do not want cheap, efficient cars. It seems to me that we will accept 30-ish mpg and pay a bit more for a car that suits our overall driving style, than look for a basic car that gets really good mileage. That’s why they don’t make the Sprint anymore. That, and we have Priuses and Insights now.

2

Most affordable economy cars top out at 35-40 mpg from what I have seen. I do not see affordable cars that get 50mpg anymore like the metro, I don’t even know if any economy (non-hybrid) cars can get 40+mpg. You have to buy a hybrid to get that kind of mileage.

I’ve driven a metro, and found it very basic. I would take a 35mpg sedan that was comfortable over a basic metro that got 50mpg. Plus the metro I drove had issues, it couldn’t drive on the interstate since it couldn’t go 70mph anymore (it did highway driving fine, but took roughly a minute to get to 55mph). However again this is an older model, it likely accelerated fine at first. But in between the spartan interior and the inability to accelerate, I’d rather have a hyundai and pay an extra $40/month in gas.

My older brother used to be able to drive 500 miles for $10 in that thing back when gas was $1/gallon.

3

My Wife had a Chevy Sprint when we first started dating. It was a pretty good little car but could not handle what we need a car to do. I was pretty impressed with it though.

Admittedly, we have some pretty big requirements. And now have two SUV’s to handle them. If it made sense money wise and logistically to also have a small car, I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

4

I don’t know about anybody else, but being alive is worth more than 1000 MPG, let alone 50 - those cars were all death traps/safety nightmares - several classmates had Geo Metros when I was in high school and those things rolled easily, and lacked safety features that are required today.

5

I agree. The only person in my class who had a Chevy Sprint also wrecked it in a single car accident with her sister in it. They were both hurt badly but luckily not killed. It could have easily gone the other way.

I asked here once why they didn’t just make an updated version of a Chevy Sprint or Geo Metro instead of the inferior SMART cars. The answers suggested that you can’t update that design to modern specs without changing everything else about it and that would make it both cost a whole lot more and get worse gas mileage than its predecessors. Still, I can’t think of a product that exemplifies a solution in search of a problem than a SMART car in the American market. The gas mileage for those is terrible considering all the other tradeoffs you have to make and that is supposed to be its major selling point. I would expect something that tiny to get in the 70’s for gas mileage but it barely beats real cars twice its size for gas mileage and sometimes not even that. I have no idea why someone would want one unless they value an activist image over basic math.

Americans certainly don’t have a problem with fuel efficiency just as long as it doesn’t impact vehicle size, utility or performance all that much. It is really just a basic math problem though. The premium cost for high mileage vehicles doesn’t pay for itself quickly enough over less fuel efficient vehicles for the amount of driving most people do. Going from 25 - 40 miles per gallon usually requires some rather severe tradeoffs and limited range of vehicle choices. If those tradeoffs also cost you 10 - 15K over a more mainstream vehicle, it will take years to make that back through gas cost savings and may exceed the life of the vehicle. That isn’t enough to spur widespread adoption in the American market.

6

I had a 1994 Suzuki Swift that I loved, my brother had a Sprint that he loved. In my recent car hunt, I was looking for something along those lines - very small, good gas mileage, stick shift (this was essential). There’s not a much out there that’s affordable and reliable - I wasn’t going to buy another Ford, so the Focus was out, and while the Chevy Spark was about the size I was looking for, having rented one last year, it’s just not a great ride for any longer drives. It does, though, look like it might have close to the MPG I got in the Swift, at least for the manual transmission.

I ended up with a Yaris - I love it - it’s a comfortable drive, but the gas mileage isn’t quite what I expected (granted, 90% or more of my driving is city driving).

So, yes, some people do. But those people aren’t in the majority for a wide swath of reasons.

7

I’m sure car companies spend a lot of money researching this. And they choose not to offer their most fuel-efficient models and versions in the US. Even when the same model car is available, they only offer the larger engines in the US. (E.g. the Honda Fit is only available with the 1.5-liter gasoline engine in the US; in Europe and Asia, the base model has a 1.2-liter gasoline engine.)

So obviously all those car companies have concluded that Americans want larger, more powerful cars, and fuel efficiency is very low on our priorities. (Except for the niche market of people who want a “green” car as a status symbol, or drive thousands of miles a month; but those people don’t mind paying >$20k for a fuel-efficient car, hence the Prius.)

And the reason is pretty obvious: because gas is so cheap here.

8

I totally would have bought a Prius when we bought our car, but considering that we’ve now had our car for more than 2 years and have yet to hit 9k miles, the cost premium wasn’t worth it. We may well have bought a Prius C if it had been available when we bought our car, though.

9

FWIW, my office is 110 miles from my house. I telecommute three days per week, but that’s still 21,000 miles per year just to go to the office. It’s a 50-mile round-trip ‘into town’. I go there at least twice per week, and the SO has been making the trip six times per week. So getting great mileage is major consideration. The next most efficient four-wheeler is the SO’s 2000 Toyota Tacoma, at 25 mpg. [Aside about the Tacoma: People are always asking if it’s for sale. And that was before the spiffy original-colour repaint!]

So it was worth $9,800 for the Prius. We’re probably saving about $2,200 per year in fuel costs.

10

They’re popular in my part of Brooklyn, which has old, narrow streets and very, very little off-street parking (and what there is is expensive – in the neighborhood of $300-$400 per month). For people who don’t need a full-sized car, the ease of parking is worth quite a bit.

11

Of course Americans want cheap fuel-efficient cars. The trouble is that Americans who buy new cars are a relatively small portion of the population and they for the most part don’t.

What really sets the American car market apart from the rest of the world isn’t cheap fuel*, it’s that used cars are unusually cheap to buy and to own. In places like Japan and the much of Europe, government regulations make owning an older car a bit of a hassle, and in the poorer countries there often just aren’t enough used cars in the market and so they don’t cost all that much less then new ones. In the US, though, used cars have always been plentiful and cheap and there’s no particular artificial barriers to owning an older car.

What this means is that if you’re an American whose main priority is keeping your transportation costs down, there is absolutely no way you are going to buy a new car. The used market is just way too attractive. Back in the days of the Geo Metro, cars didn’t last nearly as long and so you could maybe justify a new Metro instead of a couple of year old compact on grounds of reliability, but you can’t really do that now. So, by definition, people who buy new cars in the US aren’t too concerned about getting a bargain or about fuel costs (since they’re miniscule compared to new car depreciation, ect). The fact that new car buyers in the US are irrational (economically-speaking) is part of the reason why the used car market is so robust-- people know used cars are better deals, but keep buying new ones anyways and so there’s always a bit of oversupply.

In much of the rest of the world, used cars aren’t nearly as attractive and new car buyers are a bigger proportion of the driving population at large. There’s a lot more people in the new car market who are looking to save money, and so things like tiny no-option econoboxes and slow-ass small displacement diesels appeal to some people who are actually going to be buying new cars.

(*See for example countries like Australia (or even Canada these days) where fuel prices are much higher but people drive similar cars to Americans. Also see countries like Venezuela, where fuel prices are much lower but new car buyers still buy small-engined econoboxes.)

Nitpick-- the carburated Sprint got slightly poorer mileage than the equivalent fuel-injected Metro. The problem with fuelly.com is that those are all self-reported and self-reported mileage estimates are notoriously unreliable. The actual government ratings at www.fueleconomy.gov will generally give you a better apples to apples comparison. Which, incidentally, is part of the mystique of the Geo Metro-- they changed the test cycle in (IIRC) 2007 and all the mileage numbers after that were lower. If you compare side-by-side with the new numbers, the Geo Metro isn’t THAT much better than the average new economy car.

12

From here:

I have to admit that I don’t have direct experience with the Geo Metro. I can say that the 1988 Sprint Metro got slightly poorer mileage than the '85 Sprint. According to the Wiki article, both cars had carburettors.

13

I think what that’s saying is that they had to redesign the head to allow optional fuel injection, which had the side effect of lowering the mileage on the carbureted cars. If you look at the fuel economy ratings, the fuel injected Geo Metros are mostly much better than the old carbureted Chevy Sprints.

14

I certainly don’t have any trouble believing the Geo Metro got better gas mileage than an equivalent new car in certain duty cycles - they weighed almost 1000lbs less than a car like say, the Honda Fit (Official Honda Autos USA | Honda) - ~2600lbs AT vs ~1700lbs for a 92 geo metro (http://www.edmunds.com/geo/metro/1992/features-specs.html).

15

Having driven mostly air cooled VW’s most of my life, I don’t have the same safety concerns as a lot of Americans. I really wish the US would allow the import of Japanese Kei cars (660cc maximum engine size with great gas mileage). They’re great little around town cars and cute as hell.

Daihatsu convertible coupe.

Suzuki Cappuccino.

I’d kill for this old school VW bus kit on a 1994 Subaru Sambar.

16

That’s a good question, Johnny. I’d say the short answer is no, they don’t.

I want a cheap, efficient car for my minimal driving, but I also want one that is going be be reliable for many years and not fall apart if I hit a bump - the two still seem to be mutually exclusive.

Another factor is that North Americans, in spite of rising gasoline costs, are still very much in love with SUVs and mini-vans. I think the majority of parents think that you can’t even consider driving anything but a large vehicle if you have kids.

17

One friend of mine made a very good point in that department - kids are required by law to be in the rear seat and child car seats until relatively high ages these days (age 8 in Illinois). So if you have more than 2 kids under 8, or even if you ever need to carry 2 kids under 8 and 2 or more other passengers, you are pretty much going to need a larger vehicle. Which means carpooling is a huge PITA without a minivan, among other things. I don’t even know if there are non-minivan vehicles that can deal with more than 2 child seats, and 2 child seats already means nobody else is going to fit in the back seat.

18

Who needs kids? I sometimes wish for a large vehicle just so I have a fighting chance of seeing over all the other large vehicles out there.

(I drive an aging Saturn-- next big repair bill is likely to be its last).

19

America is all about 2 things:

Getting bigger stuff and getting more stuff.

At least for most people.

I like high MPG cars but I am not typical

20

That’s part of why we chose the Juke - it’s not large, but it’s much higher off the ground than our previous car (a 1997 Sentra). There are a ton of SUVs, minivans, and light trucks in this neighborhood, and our parking spot is in the alley, and we had quite a number of head-on near misses trying to turn out of the alley without being able to see around all the taller vehicles.