This year at the LA Auto Show, Nissan unveiled a new vehicle, the Cube. While the Cube has been kicking around in Japan for quite a few years, it had good company. There are tons of similarly shaped compact and subcompact cars that don’t make the Cube seem quite so out of place. In North America that’s a slightly different story. Sure, there’s the Scion xB, but that’s just one car, hardly a class or a design trend in and of itself.

The Cube will go on sale in the spring and will come with the same 122-hp engine that currently comes in the Nissan Versa and will be available with either a 6-speed manual transmission or a CVT that should put the lovable box slightly above 30 mpg. Nissan hopes to make this car a new model for utility and convenience, but without the waste that goes along with driving your truck to the store to tow the groceries home.

But the real question is, will it work? Nissan wants to appeal to a large cross-section of the North American consumer with this car, and looking at the success the xB has had, I think that’s definitely possible. However, it’s also possible that the xB has simply filled a niche that is now saturated, and that at best the Cube will be fighting within that niche for a limited market share instead of stealing buyers away from bigger, more expensive crossovers.

I sure don’t have the answer, but what do you think? Even though I may not think the car is ugly, the average consumer might. Will this car be another flop, a case of the Japanese market not translating to the North American market? Time will tell, but until then, feel free to speculate in the comments.

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Here on EcoModder we have talked about the EcoDrivingUSA program and some of Pro Formance’s results with Ford before, but I finally got a chance to go through Pro Formance’s ecodriving program. There was a lot of preaching to the choir, but I was interested to see how they approached teaching ecodriving to the average person, and not just the average person who is already interested in improving fuel economy.

The Car

Because I was second in line for the round of test drives I was in, I had to settle for the Audi A3 TDI station wagon. I don’t want to sound like I’m down on the car, since it was a very nice ride, but for several reasons I really wanted to drive the Mini Cooper (I’d never driven one, it had a stick shift, etc). Because of my disappointment I made it my goal to surpass the Mini Cooper in fuel economy in the test.

The A3 TDI is a very luxurious car, but it’s definitely not the biggest fuel sipper around. The diesel engine helps a lot, but the automatic transmission and general size of the car makes it a difficult choice for high mileage (though that doesn’t mean you can improve it).

The Drive

We went out for a drive through some very congested LA streets, which were not good at all for fuel economy. Though the test drive was only a couple of miles in each direction, my instructor had time to go through many of the standard techniques like smooth acceleration, the importance of anticipating future events, and also the importance of keeping your car well maintained.

In keeping with these tips, and not wanting to annoy my instructor, I toned down my own ecodriving and tried to do my best simply by anticipating stops and avoiding mashing the gas pedal at any cost. Doing this I managed to eke out 39 mpg from the station wagon, slightly edging out the Mini Cooper, which only pulled in 38.4 mpg.

Surely, I could have done better using neutral and having a fuel economy gauge, but I wanted to see what mileage would be like for a more typical driver in a car like the A3 TDI just using the Pro Formance tips, and I was very happy to see that near 40 mpg numbers could be returned, even in heavy traffic.

Post-Ride

After the ride I got a chance to talk shop with some of the Pro Formance guys and learned that many of them practice more involved ecodriving techniques and are interesting in some of the ecomods that are fairly common. I was really impressed with their work and their mission, and hope that they can expand their operation to get in touch with more drivers.

Also, I learned that from their study on ecodriving with Ford, they realized a few things about the way different groups of people drive. For example, men and younger people tended to show a greater improvement with ecodriving, primarily because they were more aggressive in their driving techniques before taking the Pro Formance class. At the same time, everyone in the study still managed to improve their mileage, even the old ladies!

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While I was at the LA Auto Show, I wrote a lot of things for a friend of mine who runs EcoGeek, but I haven’t had much time yet to do the same with EcoModder. That will be rectified in the coming days, but until then I thought some of you might be interested to see what I had written thus far:

• The LA Auto Show’s 5 Most Exciting Green Cars: My own personal roundup of what I thought was exciting at the show.
• Honda Debuts Eco-Assist Gauge Cluster (and more!): Definitely a great idea from Honda.
• Faurecia Interiors Help Cars Use Less Gas: A look at one of the more interesting ways in which the industry is trying to save fuel.
• Mitsubishi i MiEV Test Drive: Hard to say much more than “I loved it”
• Nissan Stresses the Future of EVs: It was a grim sort of auto show, but there’s some hope for those who make it to the long term.
• MINI E World Premiere: A great car that I’m very excited about seeing on the roads soon.
• Jetta TDI is Green Car of the Year: Clean diesel takes the gold this year at the LA Auto Show.
• LA Auto Show Press Kit Awards: A fun little thing I wrote comparing the waste in the press materials.
• The Green Promise of the LA Auto Show: Was this promise delivered on? It’s hard to say.

As I said, there’s more in the pipeline, but feel free to read and comment away,

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