I own a 2008 Honda Fit. In about 75% city driving I average about 34 mpg. On the highway I'm well over 40 mpg.
The car is roomy on the inside, and admittedly it's not a GTO...but it's not slow.
I looked at both the Cobalt and the Aveo before I bought the Fit. One of my best friends owns a Chevy dealership and he would have sold me either car for what he paid for them. But in my humble (and GM biased) opinion the Fit was a better care by a good margin, and so I spent the extra money and bought the Fit.
I'm going to disagree with you there. I have a coworker who owns a Fit and we raced once leaving work from a stoplight and my Avalanche left him for dead. And I consider my Avalanche to be slow
As for the economy you get, its probably more to do with the way you drive than anything else. The Fit's less aerodynamic than Cobalt and in typical Honda fashion lacks any form of torque. Cobalt's torque is what makes it efficient. It allows for really tall gearing and low RPMs at high speeds. If you drove an XFE the way you drive your Fit you'd probably get better mileage.
I wouldn't imagine that they would handle too well. The XFE sounds like a great deal, but I would probably swap the tires out.
The tires are part of what makes it an XFE.
How would low rolling resistance tires handle in snowy weather?
Not so good. But if you deflate them by ~5psi before driving in snow it should be better.
My last two highway excursions in our much more powerful and better handling '06 Cobalt SS 2.4 yielded 33mpg, so IMO, nothing to see here.
On another front, I'm seeing ads for the Honda Fit touting its 33mpg highway rating.
For such a small and low powered (117 hp, 106 lb/ft) car that is nothing short of pathetic.
Don't forget the sub-compact class is about cheapness not necissarily economy. Their tallish vehicles with a big frontal area for something so small. That combined with torqueless engines and crappy transmissions makes the whole class less eficient than the size up compact class. I mean the Fit's 33mpg rating is matched by the much larger and more powerful Aura/G6/Malibu.
Nice article, wish the tires were better. Do the LRR tires really make that big a differencs? What maybe a 1/10th per mpg. Get better tires on it and standard PL and were golden.
It was the LA Times that GM pulled their ads from.
NYT just doesn't like GM. But they sometimes have a point.
Its not just GM, the NYT doesn't like most domestic products in any industry. They're appealing to their foreign loving yuppie crowd.
Even in the real world you give up 57 hp to gain a measly 3 mpg.... like I said earlier, that's pathetic.
It's not just the Fit... most of the weak sub-compact class (including the Aveo) is quite sad as well.
If the Cruze shows up with 40+ mpg and 140hp, now that's more like it.
The Fit/Aveo/Yaris/Versa are cheaper to buy than a Civic or Cobalt. That's their appeal. The cost about the same as a 4 year old family sedan with 40k on it. But I agree from a powertrain standpoint, they are lame. Less power and less MPG's than a bigger/faster vehicle.
