The Honda Fit tells us about America

Healthy mileage?

Cargo fine?

You can look

A long, long time.

My ancient Subaru wagon finally died last winter. Rats! What to do? It got great mileage, carried lots of stuff, and had a four-wheel drive button for the deep snow. Naturally they stopped producing it in 1994. Probably wasn’t making enough money. Since then Subaru has gone exclusively to all-wheel drive with its poorer gas efficiency.

Where to turn? The same place everyone else turns, of course. Google. The EPA site there quickly informed me that pickings were slim. Last summer’s gas spike had jolted us drivers, but not U.S. auto manufacturers. They developed new priorities (like bailouts) of their own — not ours — as well as a great reluctance to give up SUVs and minivans with their juicy profit margins. Leave those small, efficient cars to the foreigners.

Lord knows that strategy had worked like a charm for decades. Tens of billions in advertising and pseudo-research have convinced us that we need big cars for convenience and for the protection of our beloved families. America has bought that pitch hook, line and sinker, much to the amazement of other countries.

 A visit to Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa finds predominantly small cars. Don’t those people care about convenience and their precious relatives?

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Google made plain that no American makers had anything small enough to satisfy environmentalists, and among scarce competitive imports, the Honda Fit was clearly the best...um...fit. Pretty good cargo space and very good mileage. Unfortunately, there’s a stupid lip inside the tailgate so you can’t just slide heavy stuff out. Society retrogresses.

So I bought one, waiting seven weeks for the boat to come in. Back in January people were still traumatized by the recent gas spike and were gobbling up those little sippers. Now it’s different. Folks have forgotten, and even little cars are piling up on the lot. Like gas wasn’t going to zoom again in our lifetime.

And a note here about Ford. For years it earned plaudits by producing the Escort, an efficient compact model with a wagon option. Then not so long ago it retired the Escort, replacing it with the Focus, also rather well regarded by Google, by owners and by dealers. So naturally a couple years ago they discontinued the wagon option, much to buyers’ and dealers’ dismay. If you want a Ford to carry cargo now, buy an Explorer!

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Our personal savior, the Fit, gets its great mileage (35 to 40 mpg for me) by using a tiny 1.5-liter engine and by being made of tissue paper. Such low power is a problem for many Americans. We like to zip around town, not normally a feature of a 1.5 motor. The solution? Gear it down so you’re already in fifth gear before you reach the corner. This makes it peppy at low speeds, but winds up that poor little engine on the highway as though it were going airborne.

Once the American market becomes truly serious about conservation, Honda will hopefully add a sixth gear, as some pricier automakers already do.

The car also has plenty of standard features that I don’t want. There’s the air conditioning, power windows, tire pressure alert, oil meter, fancy keys and enough stuff to fill a 325-page owners manual. All for only $15,000!

You might ask whether you should buy this baby in lieu of a hybrid. If it had that sixth gear, definitely. As it is, the hybrid still gets better mileage, is pricier, and requires a lot more of Mother Nature’s resources to manufacture.

However, it doesn’t yet come as a wagon. The best answer probably is to hang in for awhile if you can. New models are trickling toward the dealerships even now. The Chinese are allegedly preparing a low-gizmo number to undersell everything on the market today. That would be fitting competition for Detroit, which seeks to cure its ills by selling us behemoths and doodads. Let’s all head down to the dock and wait impatiently.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.