I sincerely hope you’re right. If letter writer is not interested in cars to the extent that buying something old and dumb to fit in with family is a very bad idea. If they like cars and just haven’t needed/wanted one lately and don’t trust their skills, with their budget and skills I’d still potentially say it isn’t…

I’ve driven a few Focus ST and a recent Civic Si.

I test drove a 2017ish Civic Si and drove to the dealership in my S2000.

They do! I’m saying the OP doesn’t seem like someone who would be described as a ‘car guy’ (to their credit!). Dunno, my extended family like mcmansions and bad politics, I’m not talking up Tom Cotton to get high fives.

The asker feeling a need to get a car to garner family’s respect makes it worse.

Respect from car chuds is one of the least valuable things in the world. Only Brian O’Connor values that.

Holy shit that’s good.

The current Si is plenty. It drives really well. Y’all’s expectations are ridiculous.

....that’s a Civic Wagon, also known as the wagovan.

I just checked my spreadsheet. 27.7 MPG over 18k miles.

I agree, my S2000 that I’ve averaged 28 MPG in over my years of ownership is a gas hog relative to my daily. Thus why I rarely drive it.

EPA ratings do exist, of course.

I’m open to the 2300# thing being flexible, it just has to be restrictive enough to actually change the market for the better.

A nine year old 5MT Fit that averages 42 MPG during the summer months and about 35-37 MPG during the winter months with snow tires.

I wish they were driving more fuel efficient cars for most purposes, but the amount of Durangos, X5, Yukon/Tahoe, etc., that I see with a single person just cruising down the interstate suggests anecdotally they probably aren’t. Or the garages upon garages in suburbia that just have a few of these things sitting…

Alternatively, it would force the market itself to change. It isn’t hard to make cars that can carry a bunch of folks, pretty safely (especially with other cars being similarly small), comfortably, etc. The Mazda2 and Honda Fit have both existed very close to both of my numbers above recently.

I have even more ire for those purchases/vehicles. I’m not the person to be questioning for this. I don’t believe anything that gets less than 40 MPG should be available without a special license, ditto anything over 2300 pounds.

Because we’d like for climate change not to ruin lives? Because we’d like there to be humans able to live on this planet in the future? Because we’d like to slow the human-caused mass extinction event that is ongoing right now?

TIL you can see a shitty, regressive attempt at a joke, call it out for being shitty, regressive, just one in a long line of weird, horny ‘jokes’ this middle aged guy keeps making because he hasn’t matured beyond middle school in 1993, call it out, and somehow be called a pervert for it.

Brutalism and these monstrosities have nothing in common.