[ever_green]

My sister recently decided to buy her first car. She is rather cheap when it comes to cars and therefore fuel efficiency, price and maintenance are all top priorities. She recently test drove the elantra, civic and the corolla. really liked the elantra. I decided to ask her why she hasn't test drove the fit? it has ample cargo and very reliable. Well it turns out the fit is only rated 34mpg highway and the elantra is 39mpg according to US government fuel economy ratings. So i thought to my self this just can't be right, I have driven both the elantra and the fit as rentals and I remember the fit using same if not less than elantra. Surely to find out and to bypass the EPA rating gimmicks I looked at sites like truedelta and fuelly and what I found was according to my thoughts. The fit does in fact average better MPG returns than the elantra. I see 7.8L/100km for the elantra and 7L/100km for the fit. So this begs the question whether EPA ratings are to be totally ignored? I sometimes see new cars with big V6 engines having better EPA ratings than my old corolla, but when you drive them you average much MUCH less than that. eg. ford mustang v6, chrysler 200 and acura RDX.