I’m a big fan of wagons and hatchbacks. We are on our second Matrix - amazing head- and rearseat room. I would have difficulty going back to a standard sedan. When looking, we only looked at the Outback, Passat wagon, and Venza, before deciding another Matrix was sufficient. Figured the couple of times a year we needed more space, we could rent a lot of minivans/wagons with the money we were saving.
My wife and I still occasionally speak foldly of her car when we met/married - a Datsun 210 4-spd. File that one under cars I wish we still had…
My “new” car is a 62 Corvair Monza coupe. Tho it isn’t a hatchback (and the trunk is in the front) the rear seat folds down and I usually keep it that way. Forms a nice carpeted area to stick the dogs, any packages, or whatever.
I’ve never been big on hatchbacks, since the only thing I usually have to carry is myself. However, last Saturday I picked up my new ride – an Audi A3 TDI. It’s basically a 5-door hatchback, although they call it a wagon.
Got it more for the fuel mileage (30/42) and the $1300 tax credit, but I can see the hatch having some advantages. For one, it’s easier to load than a sedan’s trunk, as you don’t have to lift bags over a high sill. As I’m rapidly approaching 50, and have almost no upper-body strength, that is definitely a plus.
Definitely. I got 10 years and 120,000 miles out of my 1993 Impreza. There was a tear in my eye when I waved goodbye to it. ::sniff:: It was a very reliable car.
Hatchbacks are awesome. My favorite former car was a hatchback Dodge Shadow, and I loved that thing before I had to retire it due to repair costs. My next car, which committed suicide two weeks ago wasn’t a hatchback, and that was one of the many reasons it sucked. The Versa I just bought is red, which I said my first new car would be, and a five-door hatchback. So far I like it a lot.
I’ve got the Mazda Protege5, precursor to the 3. Love love love it. Didn’t know it could be classified as a hatchback; I’ve always called it a sport wagon. I guess in my mind, a hatchback only has two doors.
But definitely much love for the hatchback. I’m currently eyeing the Scion xD as my next car. That said, I’m not looking to replace my Mazda for years yet.
Frasier: It’s called a hatchback.
Niles: Oh sure, name a car after its most hideous feature.
Mr. S and I roared. We’ve always owned at least one hatchback: a Pontiac T1000 (same as a Chevette), a 1995 Ford Aspire (our second one after the 1994 was totaled), and most recently a 2008 Chevy Aveo. We don’t use the Aveo for hauling much because we also have a minivan, but it’s good to know we could if we wanted to. We still have the Aspire, but it’s a bit of a rattletrap at 200K miles. It still gets close to 50 MPG, though.
Our old minivan died in January 2008, and that’s when we bought the Aveo to replace it (Mr. S needed a reliable commute car). So then the Aspire became our “cargo vehicle” for a year until we bought the current minivan. We NEVER carried more than just us in the Aspire, so we tore out the backseat to enlarge the cargo area. Now we use it mostly for hauling stuff to the dump and the occasional jaunt around town. It may be on its last legs this year, though. I’d buy another Aspire if I could, despite one review I read that said it was so named because “it aspires to be a real car.”
I’ve had three cars in my life, all hatchbacks. I have no reason to drive a big car or SUV since most of the time its just me. I like the good gas mileage small cars get and I couldn’t imagine driving a regular small sedan when I could get a hatchback. Being able to tell the guy in the used furniture store after I bought a rocking chair, oh I’ll just put the seats down and we’ll just slide it into the back of the car. Sure, the car looks tiny (this was a civic) but it fit with ease.
When my Honda Civic hatchback died the dealership tried to sell me on a new Civic because the Honda Fit was still fairly new in the U.S. and dealerships weren’t getting many. This was Spring 2007. This dealer didn’t have any and didn’t know when they would. I kept saying, no. I’d get another Civic if there was a hatchback model, but there wasn’t. I ending up having to call all over the place trying to find a dealer that had at least one Fit just to test drive.
The first new car I bought after graduating from college was a Mazda 323 hatchback. Great car! Very basic - it didn’t even have A/C or a tape player or anything. And I could do a lot of my own maintenance on it - changing the oil, spark plugs, etc - stuff that I wouldn’t even think of trying to do nowadays. I had that car for almost ten years then gave it to my step-daughter when I bought my next car - a Mitsubishi Eclipse, which now that I think about it was also a hatchback of sorts, but way more fun to drive!
I bought a 1988 Ford Festiva with 93000 miles on it for $1000 in November 2000. I put 88000 more miles on it before it met a tree two years ago. I got $1500 for it from the other guy’s insurance company. This had to have been my best utilitarian car ever- I took a washing machine and a full-size dishwasher (one at a time) home in that car with the hatch fully closed.
The closest 2008 car I could find that got close to the Festy’s mpg while burning gas was the Yaris 3-door, so that’s what I replaced it with.
Got a Yaris and want cruise control? Go to Yarisworld.com. DIY instructions reside there, and it works.
Back in late '73, my dad took delivery on a '74 Vega hatchback. It looked like a miniature station wagon, and even had wood on the sides; the main paint colour was this horrid metallic green.
It wasn’t a bad car, but like most early 70s cars had been made out of recycled metal which they hadn’t neutralized the rust in. We wound up dumping the Vega within two years, just when dad noticed the beginnings of surface rust in the rocker panels.
One would think that GM would have realized that this was a problem, but the '76 models actually used to sprout surface rust on the showroom floor.
Hatchbacks were okay, but nowhere near as useful as a full-sized wagon, where the back door could either come down like a truck tail-gate, or swing open sideways. With the back seats down, you had enough space to fit a 4x8 sheet of plywood easily.
First car, a very used Datsun 210 hatch. I don’t have the love for it that Dinsdale has. Too slanted a back to have really great cargo room, and the cross-wind stability was so poor that I had to drive down the freeway steering into the prevailing wind, then correct fast at underpasses. My two Civic hatchbacks, I’ve loved. Amazing what you can get into one. My mother used to have a SAAB hatch, a pretty big car for a hatchback. She used to show up in it to pick up landscaping supplies and have workers laugh that she thought she was going to get everything in. She always did. She said it was her suburban pick-up.
I bought a 2009 Honda Fit last year, and yes, I love it. I mean, love is an understatement. I went to the store yesterday and bought a 42’’ plasma television, and the thing fucking fit in my car. It took me all of two seconds to fold the seats down, pop open the hatch and insert the TV. You look at it from the outside, and it’s sooo tiny, but on the inside it’s like some crazy optical illusion where everything magically fits inside. It’s downright roomy in there. And I get 40 miles to a gallon highway, 35 city. Ridiculous. I don’t even understand how something so perfect can exist, much less be mine.
'09 Yaris 5-door replaced the rattling beast that was a Neon. It’s my first hatchback, and have loved it since I picked it up. Hauled 5 bags of mulch with room to spare this afternoon. Perhaps I’m hooked…
Funnily enough, when I bought my second Yaris (the first one having been taken over by my brother), every comparable car in the market was baseline-cheaper but the only one which included two airbags in the base model was the Yaris; it was also the only one with AC - in Spain. We call the two Yaris “the Black Hole twins” because of the kinds you can manage to fit inside. And I’ve been able to do things like pull out of a pretty tight parking spot with cars double-lined ahead and behind, with a single gear change (back a handspan, head forward, watch blonde in 2nd-row-car ahead stare at me openmouthed).
I’d buy another Aspire if I could, despite one review I read that said it was so named because “it aspires to be a real car.”