My next car?

[cjsmith]

I like small. (To give you an idea, I consider today's Corolla "a bit big".) I like good gas mileage. I like efficiency, especially in design.

Small, sleek, and gets unprecedented mileage.

I would only have to make my current car last until 2009. Hey, why not? Twenty years is a nice round number.

Disadvantages: diesel fuel (not at every gas station around here), unproven design (can't count on getting twenty years out of this one).

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

It's hard to sell that sort of thing over here because it's hard to get it to pass US emissions standards, so you can't even bring it to market. (For a while you couldn't even get the VW TDI.) On a one-by-one basis, you can fake it with Maryland "Dealer" Plates (also a popular trick for getting the Lotus 7 on the road.)

I actually saw a SmartCar in motion a couple of nights ago, crossing RT 2 heading into Lincoln (instead of parked, like most of the ones I have pictures of. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/search/tags:smartcar/)) The odd shape made it stand out, it was certainly moving quickly enough :-)

(As for diesel fuel - california might be excessively special, but semis run on diesel, you're not going to ever fail entirely to find it - you'll just have to look harder. This is inconvenient when travelling in strange cities, but not a problem along highways at all, from what I could tell over the last 5 years... and when most of your driving is in familiar areas, it's really not a problem.)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'd be awfully surprised if something that gets 150+ MPG has trouble meeting emissions standards.

Obviously diesel's findable, but having to look harder *is* a negative. Another possible negative, obviously, is safety -- a car that weighs 470kg has some disadvantages right out of the starting gate. (But then, as I told joedecker earlier today, it's probably safer in some respects than what I'm driving today. It has airbags.)