The Honda FIT; The Car of the Future Today

Honda's Fit meets fuel economy rules that are still several years away.
Joseph B. White
Wall Street Journal
06 May 2008 03:32

Detroit is partying like it's 1979.

Gasoline prices are soaring. Big V-8 powered muscle machines are gathering dust on dealer lots. Sales of small cars are surging. The government is ordering steep increases in new vehicle fuel economy in the cause of reducing America's reliance on foreign oil.

What's this nasty flashback mean for the future of the automobile? Maybe you think the antidote to gas pump angst is a plug-in hybrid such as the Chevy Volt, or a new generation all-electric car such as those that Nissan Motor Corp. says it may launch in the U.S. as soon as 2011 . If so, you'll need to wait, or take your chances with one of the flock of tiny upstart car companies testing their wings on the Internet.

But there are mainstream, name-brand cars you can buy today that can vault you all the way to 2011 or 2012 -- at least in terms of the new fuel-efficiency targets the Bush administration is proposing for the next seven years. One such car is Honda Motor Corp.'s Fit.

The Fit, which typically sells for about $16,000, occupies a niche in today's U.S. auto market similar to the one the early Honda Civic hatchbacks occupied during the 1979-80 oil crunch period. Standing in for the gas-guzzling Pontiac muscle cars and Lincoln land yachts of the late 1970s are vehicles like the Chevrolet Tahoe, one of the best-selling big sport utility vehicles that lorded over the highways just a few years ago.

The Fit gets about double the mileage of a Tahoe -- 30 miles per gallon combined compared with 16 miles per gallon for the Chevy, according to government fuel-efficiency estimates. (fueleconomy.gov) The Department of Transportation is proposing that by 2015, the average fuel efficiency of all new vehicles -- cars and light trucks -- should be about 31.6 miles per gallon. If our vehicle fleet operated at the 2015 standard today -- roughly equivalent to all of us trading in our rides for Fits tomorrow -- it would be about 25% more efficient than the cars and trucks we ride around in today.

At $3.51 a gallon, a Fit would burn up about $1,753 in gasoline during 15,000 miles of driving. A Tahoe would siphon $3,291 out of your wallet, unless you could fill it up with an E85 ethanol blend, in which case the toll would be $3,136 a year. One plus for the Tahoe: After you put $82 or so into the tank, it would run 374 miles before you had to visit the gas station again. The Fit's tiny 10.8 gallon tank only holds enough for 292 miles of driving between F and E.

If you're keeping score on carbon, the Fit would put 6.1 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, compared with 11.4 tons for the big SUV.

In other ways, the Fit represents a significant advance over the tiny Hondas that got their big break around the time Jimmy Carter was making "cardigan" a political four-letter word.

The Fit is tiny compared to the Tahoe, weighing in at just 2,551 pounds to the big Chevy's 5,233 pounds. Still, the Fit scored a five-star rating for front passenger protection in the federal government's crash tests, and a five-star rating for side-impact protection for front-seat passengers. The rear-seat passenger side impact score was three stars.

Those are the same scores as the Tahoe, except for the rear-seat side-impact test, where the tall-riding SUV scored five stars.

That doesn't mean I'd want to crash my Fit into a Tahoe. I didn't pay a lot of attention in high school physics, but I grasped the basics about mass and momentum.

But Honda's focus on the problems presented by making a subcompact car more crashworthy has produced a vehicle that is objectively safer for its occupants than a 1979 Civic, but also feels safer and more solid on the road.

The Fit also offers clever solutions to the other problem with small cars. They're small. There's not as much room for people and stuff. The Fit uses a variety of tricks � including positioning the gas tank in the center of the car so that the seats can fold flatter and lower to the ground � to increase cargo capacity. (Other manufacturers who've focused on improving their small cars over the years work what industry people call "packaging" just as hard � including the European and Asian arms of the Detroit manufacturers.)

So are we all ready to drive cars like the Fit? A lot more of us are than were a year ago. The Power Information Network's analysis of vehicles traded by people buying Fits shows that the top three trade-ins are larger Honda models. But at No. 5 on the list is the Dodge Caravan, with the now discontinued Chevy Blazer SUV at No. 6.

Sales in the "lower small" segment as defined by Autodata Corp., which includes the Fit and rival cars such as the Chevy Aveo or the Nissan Versa, are up 33.9% through the first four months of this year, jumping even as sales of all cars and light trucks fell nearly 8%. The Fit isn't the biggest seller in its segment � that title belongs to the Toyota Yaris. But new Fits are selling in just 20 days after hitting the dealerships, according to Power Information Network data. That's one day faster than the average Toyota Prius and more than twice as fast as the average Yaris.

How bad is the big SUV market? General Motors Corp.'s production of vehicles like the Tahoe has been crippled for nearly three months by a strike at a major supplier, and GM dealers still had 125 days worth of unsold Tahoes nailed to their lots as of April 30. Overall, large SUV sales are cratering, down 29% so far this year, according to Autodata figures.

The asteroid has landed on the dinosaurs. Vehicles like the Fit look like the crafty mammals that will thrive among the wreckage, until something more highly evolved comes along.