Hey - I drive one of those and I am neither American nor obese - and I find it hard to call any of those “enormous”, unless you are just referring to engine size compared with European cars. Somehow when a car is made for America the performance is gutted unless you put in a big engine. On a recent trip to the UK I rented a Ford Mondeo. I think it had “only” a 1.8L engine, and 4 cylinders. Even with 4 adults in it and luggage, it was a nippy car. Yet if you buy a 1.8L 4 cylinder car car here, it has no power. Can all that difference be ascribed to manual versus automatic?
Pretty much.
What does this really mean? My car will go for 18 months on a tank of gas, provided I only drive it to church on Sundays. Or it will go a week if I drive to and from work every day and do all family trips and errands on the weekends.
My 1995 Honda Accord that just died got 30 MPG highway; my 2008 Nissan Altima gets 34 MPG highway. For a mid-sized 5-passenger sedan, I’d say that’s pretty fuel efficient.
Tuckerfan, I always turn to you for automotive news. I hope using switchgrass or sustainable wood crops can be practical; makes a lot more sense than making alcohol from a food crop (grown using energy-intensive modern farming).
My 1996 Ford Escort used to get 35 mph in town, and 45 on road trips. I drove conservatively, but even so that’s pretty damn good. So why the hell am I seeing the “Smart Car” advertised in the US with 36 mpg? Thing’s the size of a bathtub.
I’ve heard that part of the problem is inferior catalytic converters in the US. Does that make any sense?
My C30 gets around 30 on the freeway, so that’s not bad.
Dues to various regs, (and the fact that diesel fuel is more expensive than gas in the USA, cheaper in Europe) it’s hard to get a diesel to qualify for the US market.
The Japanese numbers can’t be compared to the US numbers, they use different calcs, something like that old way we used to calculate milage.
Throatwarbler Mangrove Got a cite that the Accord is only made for the US market? Because according 
to the Honda World website : “Accord =Honda’s Best-Selling Vehicle” (worldwide). It sells well in Japan for example.
:rolleyes:
That’s an enormous (hehe) overstatement of facts, isn’t it? Not all Americans that own an “enormous gas-guzzling FWD 2 Door coupe” are overweight. America’s roads are longer and bigger too, fuel is cheaper, etc.
Edit: furthermore, what’s your defenition of “gas guzzling”, anyway? Most FWD coupes sold in America are pretty fuel-efficient, IIRC. A gas guzzler to me is anything that gets less than 25mpg. I drive a Scion Xa and I get 38mpg, and it’s a TINY car with a TINY engine, not for everyone. It’s about as good gas mileage as you’re going to eke out of a gasoline powered car without going hybrid or switching to a diesel (which gets better MPG in general but the diesel prices are still way more than gasoline right now).
I don’t buy that at all. People want higher mileage cars. Detroit says they don’t, and Detroit is heading into the toilet because they seem to be 100% wrong about every decision they make.
My 1987 Chevy Nova, which was a co-design with Toyota, got 50 mph on the highway and 40-45 in the city. That’s about as good as a Prius without any new technology. Have we entered some Automotive Dark Ages and lost our knowledge?
Well, you see, dudes memory of what their old car used to get is often wrong- your memory takes the best you ever got on one trip and rounds up.
Next- your 1987 Chevy Nova was a deathtrap.
It may have been a deathtrap – but it was a damned efficient one. It and the Toyota Corolla were essentially the same car that year.
Seriously, I owned that car until 2001, and if the body wasn’t rusting out I would still have it. Do large holes in the floorboards count as deathtraps? I say no, so long as you know they are there. 
I was just talking to my (English) brother and his wife about this- they’re visiting for a few weeks. They can’t help but chuckle when they see ads that treat ~30 mpg fuel economy as a selling point.
Elsewhere in the world, if your (smaller than, say, a BMW 5-series) car gets 30mpg, you don’t mention it if you want to sell any of them.
Americans drive more though. I would guess that the average American spends more money on gas than the average European or Japanese. Furthermore, in many parts of America you don’t have many alternatives to driving; you can’t take a train to work just because you can’t afford gas.
What additional tests are involved in adding an engine to the lineup? Do they have to do crash tests for each combination? I’d have thought it’s just emissions testing/certification/whatever.
Sorry - I was generalizing when I probably should have been specific. He gets 600 kms out of his tiny tank in the Tercel; I get about 500 kms out of my slightly larger tank. As for the manual vs. automatic transmission issue, I firmly believe that if you’re going to go small and fuel efficient, you’re going to be driving a soggy mess if it isn’t a manual transmission car.
Boyo Jim, I’ve wondered that same thing about Detroit more than once. I’m not the most plugged-in person in the world, and it’s obvious to me which way the wind is blowing; how do they manage to not see it? “Well, we tried putting out a smaller, more fuel-efficient car, but people just didn’t buy it.” Yeah, you put out crap as smaller cars, and then say it doesn’t work because people don’t buy them. People do some research before paying $20,000 for something, believe it or not. Or are they just trying to stick with their massive profit margin SUVs?
I think your post illustrates my point; Americans are so used to gas-guzzlers that a Tercel is considered fuel-efficient. The '99 Tercel was rated at 29 mpg; if’s pretty sad that there was nothing more efficient available that year.
No, there really aren’t many, especially if the price tag and seating capacity are also concerns. As far as I can tell, there are only 4 cars available in the US that get over 40 mpg hwy: Smart car, Prius, Accord Hybrid and the Jetta diesel. The Smart is a 2-seater; the hybrids are rather large and expensive cars. The Jetta does look OK, but still bigger and more expensive than I want.
Maybe it’s because you simply don’t see them side to side with cars from the rest of the world. North American cars are enormous, sacrificing features and refinement for sheer size…
The Honda Accord is a good example, because Honda sells both US and European versions in the US:
Base model Honda Accord Sedan (petrol 5 spd manual):
Curb Weight: 3230lbs
Wheelbase: 110"
Base model Honda Accord Coupe (petrol 5 spd manual):
Curb Weight: 3221lbs
Wheelbase: 108"
Base model Honda Accord Sedan from Honda.co.uk (petrol 6 spd manual)
Curb Weight: 3117lbs
Wheelbase: 106"
The 4 door European/Japanese Honda Accord is made in Japan and the variant with the largest petrol engine available is sold in North America as the Acura TSX. Most normal people who drive it complain about the car being too small and underpowered(4 cyl engine) for the price. The North American market Accord is made in Marysville, Ohio and sold in North America, Australia and I think Hong Kong/China. The sedan version, or rather, the somwhat more luxurious Acura TL variant, is re-exported back to Japan badged as the [url=http://www.honda.co.jp/INSPIRE/Honda Inspire. The Coupe version is not sold anywhere outside North America.
Both of these cars are aimed at the same market and yet even the 2 door version of the North American car is larger than the 4 door version of the EU/Japanese car
(The EU/JP Honda Accord is actually closer in size to the North American Honda Civic). Very few people in Britain or Japan will have any interest in such a large, sparsely equipped car, even fewer will be interested in such a large car with only two doors, and those who are interested are going to buy a Mercedes CL/CLK, BMW 6 series or Jaguar XK before they buy a Honda.
The fact of the matter is that despite what people say, no one in North America really wants Japanese or European mass market cars. The American cars (AKA giant FWD sedans with marshmallow suspension) built in the US by the Japanese car makers are often perceived as being of higher quality, which is one thorn in Detroit’s side among many. GM and Ford’s European and Chinese divisions are doing very well, GM broke even in 2007 because their overseas profits more or less made up for their massive US losses and Ford Europe as a very well-regarded brand with a strong following. GM and Ford understand the US market just as well, and I would say better than the Japanese.
What North Americans want are:
- Giant gas guzzling FWD sedans and coupes
- Giant gas guzzling body-on-frame pickup trucks with leaf springs and live axles in the rear.
- MASSIVE gas guzzling SUVs and minivans (Check out the Honda Odyssey made and sold in North America versus the Honda Odyssey sold in the rest of the world)
- V6 Mustang convertibles.
Anything else is a niche market or luxury.
The Japanese car makers have done OK on the sedans and the car based minivans but never broke into the truck market, which had much higher margins.
I’ll give you expensive (They do cost more than non-hybrid models), but large? Our Prius is pretty roomy, but it’s not what I’d call a big car.
A 4 inch difference in wheelbase and 123 more lbs is hardly what I would call “much bigger” though.
“Marshmallow suspension”?? We’re not talking about Lincoln Continentals or Crown Victorias here. Medium-sized and small (by so-called “American standards”) sedans like the Accord, Camry, etc handle quite well for their class.
Not really. A catalytic convertor really only serves the purpose of getting rid of any unburnt fuel that leaves the engine. A poorly designed one will act as a constraint on performance, but I can’t imagine it impacting the MPG more than a couple of tenths. Not really something you’d notice over a tank of gas. European cars, however, tend to be manual transmissions and those get slightly better MPG than automatics.
No, what we have lost is a willingness to push the envelope in terms of engineering. Most of the new features on cars are little more than turnip twaddlers, and not cutting edge (or even back of the blade) stuff. In the 1960s Toyota invented an “idle cutoff” switch, which shut the engine off at red lights, and then started it when you hit the gas pedal. It offered about a 9% fuel economy increase. It did not show up on a production car until the Prius, and now, they’re starting to stick them on non-hybrid cars. That thing can’t have cost very much money to install, and at most, you’d probably need a slightly beefier starter. (Another area that was abandoned for decades, and could have brought us better fuel economy, is hydraulic drive, like Tucker originally wanted to put on his cars. No one really did anything with the idea until recently, and now UPS has found it to be pretty cost effective to use.) Car makers, of all stripes, have gotten complaicent over the years and haven’t wanted to do the little things that would boost fuel economy. They’re not looking at it like, “Okay, we change this here, and we get a 10% boost, we change this there, and we get a 5% boost, we change this and get a 7% boost. Add them all together and we get a 22% boost.” They’re looking for one thing that will give them a 22% boost. That’s one of the reasons why they’ve got to jellybean shapes, since aerodynamic changes give you the biggest bang for the buck.
Not necessarily. The EPA has adjusted figures on their website (since they changed how they calculate them recently) and some older model cars do still come out quite good in comparision to modern cars. Also, older model cars tend to have lower HP engines, so they’re not quite as thirsty as modern cars. (For example, a Tucker got 20+ MPG, of course it only had flat 6, 106 HP engine for a car that weighed 3600 lbs. A modern car would get roughly the same MPG, but would have an engine that put out 300+ HP. Drop a modern 6 cylinder engine with similar HP as the Tucker engine had into a Tucker, and you’d get waaaaay better MPG out of the thing.)
Not really, and certainly not in relation to cars built before the 1970s, when things like seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, and dual master cylinders were either optional or didn’t exist.
Well, they aren’t large cars by American standards. But they’re much bigger than I need. Again, that just reinforces what I’m griping about.
The Honda Civic sedan has a wheelbase of 106". Is the Accord “much bigger” than the Civic? The weight is a little more fuzzy since the equipment starts getting different (5sp vs 6 sp trans, for instance).
Well, if you can wait a year or two, you should be able to buy Aptera, VentureOne, RaVen, or the 1L. Or if you don’t want to wait that long, you can build your own. (IMHO, I’d stay away from the RaVen.)