I'm on my second Honda Fit. I can't say it it's the most exciting car to drive but both have had zero trouble with the CVT at 110,000+ miles. The first one died a violent death (totaled twice in a year) and the second is going strong. All the major systems performed flawlessly, though there were some struggles with the hatchback handle and the tire pressure monitoring system.
I do remember renting a Dodge Caliber year back when the CVT performed terribly going up hills as automatic but it wasn't bad at all if you used the paddle shifters. I did read reviews of people who bought the things, drove 20,000 miles and complained bitterly about performance and never figured out about the paddle shifters though.
Probably bought it back from the insurance company after the first totaling. You have the option to receive $(insurance payout - current value of wrecked car) and keep the car.
I'm rather convinced that people's negative opinions of cars are almost exclusively influenced by their usage of them. Cars are complex. They all break. Everyone complains about the brands they drive, while almost always continuing to buy those brands.
I had a Chevy that very much enjoyed breaking in annoying ways (window motors, fan actuators), but I generally do like the Chevy brand.
The real issue to me with American cars, going forward, is that I cannot rely on the company to exist at any point in the future. Strikes that reduce parts and labor while making unaffordable pension demands are going to keep me away from unioned brands. And I am currently in the market for a new vehicle.
A lot of people cite CR, but their methodology is flawed. They count a confusing volume button equal to a blown transmission, and they only survey their userbase. I fundamentally do not trust a list that ranks BMW well.
I don't get what you mean here. Why else would they have negative opinions of them?
Also, we bought a minivan in 2003, put 250,000 miles on it with no major repairs, got in an accident that totaled it, replaced it with a new version of the same model, have nearly 100,000 problem-free miles on it, and would buy the same model again if something happened to this one. Some people genuinely like their vehicles. I'd guess that most people do.
Your example demonstrates what I'm talking about, but in reverse (building a positive opinion).
There are a lot of cars that will easily go 250k miles, in the same way your car does. However, your opinion of other car brands doesn't go up based on your positive experience with this car. Other car brands might actually be more reliable, but you can't form that opinion since you don't drive _other car brand_ (since most people have 1, maybe 2, cars for a long time, it's likely you aren't simultaneously experience many other car brands).
The same thing happens, in reverse. People rip on X, Y, or Z car brand for being unreliable without evaluating against the broader market. They drive X, something broke on X, so X sucks. Doesn't matter if A, B, and C brands use the exact same part from the exact same supplier, the negative opinion only applies to the brand that actively broke on the user.
I believe they're saying that the people who strongly complain about the brand that they drive are a subset of people who misuse their car and cause problems, or just always find something to complain about. That's why every single car brand has someone who complains about the brand.
No matter what brand they would have driven, they would have had something to complain about.
> No matter what brand they would have driven, they would have had something to complain about.
This is basically what I'm saying. Though, I'm not necessarily saying misuse happens. Cars are complex, things break - even on the "best" car brands.
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Right now, I have a poor opinion of GM exhaust systems and catalytic converters. I've had them go out "prematurely" on two vehicles that I've owned for extended periods of time. However, there's absolutely no indication any other vehicle would have done better in the same situation. It just happens that these are the two vehicles I owned long enough and drove enough for the exhaust system to go out.
A better explanation is that manufacturing isn't perfect and while that variability has definitely gotten better over the years, it still isn't perfect.
This is honestly surprising to me. I've driven some old ass Nissans and they are ridiculously reliable machines. 240SX and the entire Silvia engine line is solid.
Never owned a CVT but from what I understand they basically trade off fuel consumption for a bit of longevity?
All of the pre-2000 Nissans my family have owned or that my friends have owned seemed to be pretty decent (I loved my 1996 sentra). I'm really only referring to some vague date shortly after 2000 where quality took a nosedive. Not sure why though.
At some point around then I think Renault and Nissan got into some partnership.
Since owning a Peugeot in the late 90s/early 00s I have sworn off buying french cars. It required several clutches, brake calipers, a gearbox, wheel bearings, exhausts rotted like fresh fruit ... you name it - over the course of perhaps 4 or 5 years it needed to be replaced (potentially multiple times). Least reliable car I've ever had.
The thing that finally killed it was when pulling out across a busy road, the universal joint connecting one of the driven wheels to the drive shaft shattered, the drive shaft slipped out and got wedged between the inner wheel and the brakes and seized the wheel, and then it dumped a load of gearbox oil all over the road. As one of the wheels was now jammed solid it couldn't even be pushed out of the road and blocked traffic for an hour or so while we waited for it to be towed out of the way.
I have had non-Nissan Japanese cars (Honda, Toyota, Mazda) since then and they have been flawless without needing anything done apart from standard servicing.
I have a Nissan truck that has been quite good mechanically, but is rusting like a tin can. I'd be interested in another one but not unless they've improved their corrosion resistance.
I think it depends on the manufacturer. I have a Honda reaching higher mileage and it's a CVT and I love it. Never had one problem with it.
Also, I think this is one of those things where CVTs came out, there were a bunch of problems that popped up in the first 3-5 years with different manufacturers, and now those problems are largely fixed but it left people feeling apprehensive around it. Honestly, I think this CVT ICE car is going to be my last gas car anyway. It'll probably last me another 5 years easily and by then there will be even more options for cheaper EVs in the US.
There are multiple class action lawsuits and settlements with Nissan over their CVTs. My Versa with a CVT started dying around 70k miles. It had all its scheduled service. I brought it to a Nissan dealer, and paid for a transmission inspection, and they said it was totally fine, even though I regularly experienced it failing to shift (or slide, I guess) between gears while accelerating. Around 90k miles it stopped switching out of 1st gear while I was 400 miles from home. I brought it to a family friend mechanic, who showed me that the transmission fluid plug was covered in metal shavings.
CVTs, at least from Nissan are a black box. You can change the fluid, you can hook it up to a computer, but that's about it. There's no fixing them. When it's done you have to replace the entire transmission. I limped the car another 50 miles to a dealer and traded it in for a Chevy Cruze. I looked it up, and I was the only year model not to have a class action yet. Later there was, and I think they settled for a 500 dollar voucher towards a new Nissan. No thanks.
i'm always shocked when supposedly technology literate people meme like this; are you not aware of and/or dismissive of materials and mechanical engineering research in the intervening years. to such an extent that
1. the car on the left is 3x safer than the car on the right.
2. the car on the left actually does have comparable fuel efficiency (feel free to google for fuel efficiencies of the original minis)
3. the car on the left is better for the environment due to more stringent (e.g.) EPA standards for production vehicles (well at least until trump rolled them back...)
Safer than the former version of itself perhaps but not safer than the version on the left. The car on the right did not have to share the road with two to 2.5 ton SUVs and pickup trucks lifted 6 in and sitting on 21-inch rims.
> 2.5 ton SUVs and pickup trucks lifted 6 in and sitting on 21-inch rims.
this such a weird red-herring - you can literally look up mortality statistics from the decades during which these cars were manufactured and they are very bad
Road travel as a whole has gotten safer; the entire integrated system of cars, roads, and laws have collectively reduced fatalities per vehicle mile traveled. But they specific example of the mini given in the picture, is invoking a type of vehicle (microcar) that no longer exists as a segment in the US (and was barely represented here when it did exist) - even the Smart cars are gone. You're actually arguing in favor of large cars by doing this because increasing the size of all vehicles is part of that collective Improvement to safety of the squishy occupants inside.
Many of the improvements made to vehicle safety have to do with things like enforcing seat belt laws, cracking down on drunk driving, better standards for nighttime road illumination, and requiring airbags and side impact structures and anti-lock brakes. None of which would have much of an improvement on the chances of survival in a high speed collision between a micro car and just about anything on the road today. You might as well be riding a motorcycle. Either overall size of vehicles has to be brought down collectively, which I would agree with if it were possible to do, or vehicles have to be of a such a size that they are not going to be crushed to the point of frame collapse under conditions of a normal highway impact. Nor severely disadvantaged (due to height) in terms of visibility and the situational awareness of road conditions.
I would argue that your stats are even more of a weird red herring because this refers to all cause fatality across the board vs. a specific comparison against a mini car that is no longer "Mini."
3. Imagine that instead of continuing to build an enormously fragile, destructive world economy on a very temporary energy surfeit, we'd understood this could not sustain, and the car on the left was never manufactured
Would that starving kid rather have you bitch at everyone else about how people are starving or have you buy them food?
If you really want change, typing on these forums isn't the place for it. Not everything has to be a battle line, sometimes it's just a stupid meme that you chuckle at and move on.
We went from a discussion about the expense of a new car to a stupid meme to a screed about socioconomics and planetary consumption.
What I'm saying is, 90% of the internet is just one big fight after another. Maybe instead of adding to it, you spend the time taking action. Because, believe it or not, I'm generally on your side, but at some point I want to be able to read a stupid meme without seeing an ensuing fight.
I'm sure you're very smart and realize how stupid the meme is, but for every one person who is as smart as you, there are ten people who aren't, and who see the meme, and decide that, y'know what, things are fucked, and it just deepens their cynicism and hatred of the world.
(The Mini is less egregious, of course, but having two of them highlights the differences more than having two different cars.)
> 2. the car on the left actually does have comparable fuel efficiency (feel free to google for fuel efficiencies of the original minis)
> 3. the car on the left is better for the environment due to more stringent (e.g.) EPA standards for production vehicles (well at least until trump rolled them back...)
Don’t you think that if we made modern cars the size of the right one, their fuel efficiency and environmental impact would be even less? Is it not a colossal shame that in 50 years, we have not improved on these parameters?
SUVs were similarly overrepresented in fatalities relative to the proportion of their involvement in all crashes. SUVs struck 14.7% of the pedestrians and pedalcyclists investigated here, but were involved in 25.4% of the fatalities.
Is driving the primary source of the "overheating?" Are safety outcomes different in the past 50 years? Are meme's anything other than weak propaganda for half thought out points?
I like that you call out that this is mediocre even by compact car standards. We've lost so much fleet fuel efficiency because of SUVs and trucks, but there's no reason why a compact shouldn't be at least 50mpg.
I was really interested in the Chevrolet Spark until I realized it only gets 29 city/38 highway. I really don't understand how it's that bad.
Cars have gotten heavier and heavier, which explains some of it but not all of it.
My 10 year old 4000lbs 3.5L sedan gets better mpg than lighter 2024 cars with less powerful, smaller engines... I think aero probably plays a part (sleek sedan vs tall modern designs).
In terms of conserving fossil
fuels it feels like we've gone nowhere. Tailpipe emission are clearly lower, which is great, but that's just part of the battle.
The Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic are in a class by themselves in terms of fuel efficiency, there are an awful lot of other small cars, some even smaller than those two, but nothing that comes close in fuel efficiency. I think getting that efficiency requires careful end-to-end tuning out everything that other manufacturers haven’t done. Also superficially both vehicles look kinda expensive for what you seem to get but they are well built so when/if they quit making them I think you’ll see used vehicles with 100,000 miles selling at “new” prices.
I love my Corolla. 22 years old, 200k miles, runs perfectly fine. Never broken down on me. Even the interior is pristine, no rips in the drivers seat upholstery - something I’ve seen happen in a matter of years in other cars.
I felt bad when that story came out about Toyota engineers pulling the panels off a Tesla and being in shock. Sure, Tesla has done some amazingly innovative engineering. But the interior of a brand new Tesla is more rickety than my clapped out Corolla. Toyota engineers shouldn’t feel bad, they build cars that last, and that really matters to a lot of people.
We had a 2003 Toyota that only lasted ~125,000 miles, with multiple major repairs needed before then, head gaskets, transmission issues, etc.
Finally, the catalytic converter bit the dust around 120k miles, the car was driven for a little bit more and then traded in, since the cost of repairs exceeded the value of the vehicle.
The first 12-13 years of the car were great, but the last 5-6 were terrible. Maybe we got extremely unlucky, but I just don't see where the legendary reliability stories come from. Seems like they are survivorship bias in the other direction.
With any remotely reasonable assumption about the (opportunity or actual) cost of funds, that Corolla has cost more for someone to buy than it has to fill with fuel for that 22 years and 200K miles.
Building durable, reliable cars is more economically beneficial to owners than squeezing out another mile per gallon. (If you wanted to change that, you'd need to dramatically increase the tax on fuel.)
Daihatsu Charade 3 cylinder diesel was the best fuel economy of any car I've ever owned including relatively modern hybrids. That thing more than once made me doubt if the fuel meter wasn't simply broken.
> the 100mpg carburetor is still apparenrtly under lock and key
I always hoped these or similar fables like the 1-litre car would suddenly surface when Tesla and electric cars in general started to be a thing. Especially from car companies more "set in their ways" like GM or german car makers. But all this talk about efuels now makes me think they maybe dont have anything up their sleeves after all.
1L compact cars were not uncommon in Europe 10-15 years ago. Consumption was about 5L/100km (about 47mpg). Now they are being replaced with hybrids and electric versions.
My counter to all those conspiracy theories: China. They have smart engineers, too. If a 100mpg carburetor were possible, they'd be building the thing so they could cut their oil imports.
(Well, that and physics. We know how much energy we can extract from a gallon of gasoline, and no amount of cleverness can get around that.)
Modern cars weigh a lot more due to safety features like crumple zones and better protection around the cabin. We could probably get that 100mpg car if we aggressively dropped all the safety features but then we'd go back to the fatality rates of 1976.
I strongly suspect that we could make equally protective, lighter weight crumple zones if we were designing for collisions with lighter weight cars. Excessive cabin protection is largely needed because bumpers on light trucks are at head level for passengers in normal cars. Weight is a safety factor independent of crumple zones and cabin protection because in a crash m1a1=m2a2, and you don't want to get caught with the smaller m.
I'm concerned that we're currently cranking out a generation of uniquely heavy and dangerous vehicles which future vehicles will have to share the road with for decades, perpetuating these dangerous design factors.
If we designed a new 5-seat sedan that could easily reach 90 mph, but which only needed to share the road with other copies of itself, I bet we could do it in 1000 pounds and it would be far safer.
Frontal impact testing only tests for a collision with a similar sized vehicle. I’m not aware of any testing standard that applies to how a vehicle does with an outsized collision “partner” (e.g. Mini vs. F-150)
There isn't enough energy in a gallon of gas to get the typical car to 100mpg. You can get some special designed tiny cars to more than that, but the compromises on size mean that it won't be popular because of how small it must be. While they work for 90% of driving (one person), that other 10% means another car which is expensive.
By point of reference, the Prius and the Honda insight came onto the market in 1997
It is a tragedy of humanity and the environment that the world regulatory bodies did not look at the design of those two vehicles in mandate that was in 10 years. All consumer vehicles should have a hybrid drivetrain.
Modern table stakes for a car should be a plug-in range of 50 miles, 40 mpg+ highway, and 40+ mpg city.
The fact remains the vast majority of ICE vehicles are still sold without a hybrid drivetrain. So is they toot around cities in stop and go traffic they're wasting all of their kinetic energy in brake/friction heat and not reusing it for the most energetically expensive thing it does: acceleration.
Most people don't even think about the sheer waste involved with a stop sign. The amount of mechanical work we waste with brake friction and the amount of energy to reaccelerate.
If any were reading the discussion about repurposing ICE engines for home generators, you can see that the design right there. You basically can't use an ICU as a generator for anything but like 10% of its output sustained because all it's cooling is designed around intermittent high power acceleration to get the car up to speed.
Think of all that wasted weight in the engine in the ICE drivetrain to do all that acceleration when much more compact hybrid drive trains can produce better torque and acceleration for most of that use case in consumer transportation.
If in one of those decades the US since the Prius was introduced, it's simply mandated the industry go over to hybrid drivetrains especially plug in ones, we would have been so much more resistant to fluctuations and petroleum costs.
And I don't even want to think about how long ago we actually could have done some sort of hybrid drivetrain in cars. This 1997 the formative arrival of the battery sufficient to be used in hybrid drivetrains?
Perhaps it was with notebook batteries in lithium ion, but could nickel-cadmium or lead acid also done the job?
The mythical General Motors EV1 also came out in 1997. It used lead acid batteries to achieve 55-78 miles of range. Some models with better NiMH batteries like in the Prius increased that range to 105-142 miles.
Modern catalytic converters require that the engine run much richer than efficiency dictates. We could improve fleet economy for small vehicles by trading off cold start emissions for highway emissions. Or allowing cat bypass once the engine has come to operating temperature.
Exactly. I'm not sure what the appeal of these crossovers are (they're effectively small sedans on the Chassis of a small SUV) but at that price point, just get a foreign sedan that you can drive into the ground. I have a number of friends with 100k+ miles on Carollas that drive like they're brand new.
Some vehicles have gotten insanely expensive, but the real dollar cost per mile of a safe and reliable vehicle has never been cheaper.
I purchased a 2004 corolla off the lot and that bad boy is running smooth at 165k miles.
It's ugly as all get-out, for some reason people love hitting me, including a freaking semi truck on a double left turn that turned too tightly. I literally have a line going down the side of my car marking where the trailer rotated into me.
But you know what I like more than a pretty vehicle? Reliable, no car payments, cheap insurance.
Just maintain it well and those vehicles will last you a lifetime.
I am typing this sitting in my 2015 Leaf (in a parking lot), which still has 11 out of 12 segments left in the capacity meter. When I first got it (second hand) it had 155km of range on a fresh charge. Now it claims to have around 140-something.
If you go digging in the media you can certainly find examples of Leafs that haven’t faired as well as mine, but I suspect they are in the minority. Also the earlier Leafs had batteries that were not nearly as reliable, especially in hot climates.
They are warrantied for 8 years or 100k miles...but so are most of the others (including Tesla Model 3 standard range).
The ones with better than 8/100k warranties are Rivian (8/175k), Tesla (S & X: 8/150k, 3LR and Y: 8/120k), Hyundai (10/100k), and Kia (10/100k).
Chevy is slightly worse than all the other 8/100k because Chevy's warranty says it will retain 60% of battery capacity, whereas everyone else says 70%.
Thanks. I misread the article as needing to be replaced at that point and not that they should at least last that long. A reread says that they should expect to last 10 years. I assume they'd go longer with even more range degradation.
Does the expected battery replacement at years 8-12 kill the resale value for models older than 8 years?
People are actually mostly getting good performance well beyond that. Estimates are now typically that most people can expect 15-20 years or more, unless they use the car in someplace very hot, always use a very fast charger, charge up to full every time they can, and things like that.
It seems to be distance that matters more than time. Tesla has found that for their oldest models, most people still have around 90% capacity at 200k miles. The average American takes about 14 years to drive 200k miles.
The data suggests that if you don't need a low mileage battery pack replacement, because say a particular model year turns out to be a dud you will probably get 150k or more miles.
Here's some articles on EV battery life [1][2][3].
My expectation is that there will be a pretty good used market for EVs.
For example, for my next car I'd like an EV and I want to get at least 100k miles with nothing but routine cheap maintenance and replacement of consumables such as tires and fluids.
A used EV might be ideal for that, say one with 50k miles on it. That would be enough to be past early failures due to a bad model year, but still should have well over 100k left on it with good capacity.
This is good news, thank you. I've wanted a Leaf for a long time but the prices skyrocketed when covid hit. I may start to look at them or the bolt again.
When mass production of sodium ion 150 wh/kg cells huts mass production down to 40$/kwhr, this type of car will get even cheaper.
It seems nuts with all the issues car companies are having with EVs, but an EV is a simple motor (much smaller than an ice), brakes, axles, batteries and wires.
Domestic/ incumbent manufacturing really needs to stay on top of the segment because if they don't the Chinese are going to utterly invade America with it. The Chinese are basically designing the cheap urban car that can scale and purchase to a billion to 2 billion people in China and India.
That's why I think the sodium ion battery with a density sufficient for a 300 mile car hitting mass production at CATL and others is such a big deal.
This car is everything that I love about my 2015 Honda Fit, and I'm happy to see another manufacturer filling the void since the Fit's discontinuation.
While I am about to trade it in and get a truck, I have absolutely loved having a fairly basic, functional, and reliable car. It's taken my partner and I (and now our dog, who is unfortunately too large for the car!) thousands and thousands of miles across the West filled to the brim with camping gear, while also being a perfect around-town grocery-run car. Biggest repair was a failing starter motor, which ran me $600.
I have been saddened to see even the most basic cars getting loaded up with more and more features, and proportionally increasing prices. Of course some of it is mandated and unavoidable (backup cameras, etc), but I wish more manufacturers would fill out the bottom end of their model ranges with just the required stuff and not much more — letting premium features be an add-on vs. forcing the sale by only offering varieties of "everything". This is a step in the right direction!
I actually don't care about adaptive cruise control, 360-degree parking camera, remote start, a bigger infotainment screen, and a Bose stereo for this segment. I'm sure someone will tell me now that removing those wouldn't make the car any cheaper. shrug.
A reliable, well-built (not pieces falling off after one winter season) car with a manual and non-cvt transmission would make this more appealing.
In general, American roads are a lot bigger and straighter than European roads, meaning in terms of consumer preference, horsepower matters more in the former, and being nimble matters more in the latter.
I agree with you that not every car needs to have a sub-6 second 0-60 time. A 9.8 second 0-60 of the Kicks is considerably faster than, say, a Fiat Panda.
In America torque matters more than horsepower and torque is what keeps you running at high speeds. In Europe horse power matters more as that is what accelerates you from a stop. What sells (and is marketed) in each country is different of course.
No, horsepower to torque*rpm (and some other factors) is what you get at high RPMs which you normally accelerate from a stop. Once you are up to speed your transmission switches to low RPM where you get less horsepower, but better fuel efficiency.
Yes, it has become stupid in the recent years. However I used to have a 72hp car that was totally capable of barrelling down the highway at 120km/h (~= 75 miles per hour).
Nissan makes trash that can drive around for a little bit first, that's what this is.
CVTs are kind of crappy to begin with but Nissan CVTs are by far the worst.
I have heard however that their newer leaf is pretty good.