Quote:
Originally Posted by Vman455
Because the Japanese are all building big, bigger, and even bigger cars? When it first came here, the Honda Accord was 171.9" long, 63.8" wide, 53.3" high. Today, the Accord is 194.9" long, 72.7" wide, and 58.1" high. Then, it weighed 2240 lbs; now, it rings in at 3216 lbs for a barebones LX and more than 3600 for a loaded EX-L. Then, the only engine available made 75hp, today the base 4-cylinder dwarfs that output with 177hp. Heck, even the current Civic dwarfs what the Accord used to be, a full 6" longer, 4" higher, 5" wider, 10hp shy of being exactly twice as powerful, and 400-500 lbs heavier. While Honda doesn't make any "full-size" cars, Toyota/Lexus and Nissan/Infiniti do, and what we call "small" today is still much, much larger than what was small 50 years ago. Compared to their domestic competitors, imports long ago achieved parity in terms of size, weight, performance, and number of large vehicles/SUVs/trucks offered (just take a look at this chart from a recent Car & Driver comparison). |
Wow you said exactly what I was going to say, let me just add that if you look at all those cars from the Japanese manufactures they have all jumped up one class almost exactly.
Civic - old accord size
Altima - old maxima size
Sentra - old altima size
Corrola - almost old camry size
mazda3 - old 626 size
Then they all went out and brought out new cars because they no longer had a player in the small car segment
Fit
Versa
Yaris
mazda2
As for the 1.0L ecoboost, it'll be niche. You won't really have it catch on until it's the base motor, until you have people who would never have paid for it test drive it, love it, buy it and tell all their friends "I would have never thought it, I can't believe it's only a 1.0L 3cyl". It's damn hard for me to convince any of my co workers that the prius is a great car because they know that fuel economy was my main focus buying it. They see me as bias because I was willing to pay more for an economic vehicle.