Let’s get you out of the greys here if I can.
I recall the days when cheap new cars were 5k, then 10k, then 15k, now 20k. 

Well damn. Sir, I appreciate that.

I felt lame and stupid and didn’t feel like I belonged there or was Oppo enough. I don’t know if that’s really true but that’s how i felt. 

There’s nothing really wrong with an Encore. I visit GM dealers semi regularly and I sat in one and checked it out. They seem to be hardy little cars/crossovers/what have you.

SOMEONE BUY THIS MAN’S FORTE STAT

Do you talk to car salesmen? I do on a regular basis and many of them believe that most of their consumers can’t do math. People will walk in with terrible credit ratings, go super upside down on their loan, and don’t understand that if they owe on their trade in it doesn’t get forgiven for free.

I was going off 2019 numbers, if you do the math there what I said still makes sense.
The HR-V sold nearly 100k in 2019. It’s STILL more expensive and selling well anyway. Comparatively to Fits, Civics, HR-Vs, and CR-Vs are still selling like mad, so why would they keep making Fits? Dealers have told me they make…

Yeah, why not both. I have no idea why Honda makes certain decisions they do, but this one specifically seems demand driven.

I drove it and it’s not bad. Too bad the XSE model is nearly 28k out the door. But I like this suggestion most of all. I just wish there were still cars in the 17-20k new market worth suggesting. 

I don’t think it has nothing at all to do with Fit sales.
I’ll give you that the Civic and HR-V are probably cannibalizing sales away from it, and that’s significantly a bigger factor. 

As a Korean expat I’ve always been leery of recommending Hyundai without reservation. The sales and ownership experience are still mixed bags for lots of people with the satisfaction rates going up over time.

I own a Veloster now and I can point to several warts that I don’t like about it but overall it has been a…

Yeah, I might switch over to the HR-V or maybe just send them to a new Corolla. Who knows. The days of saying “just buy a Fit” are over. 

I looked it up, despite being way more expensive the CR-V is selling TEN TIMES the amount of that Fit is in the States. No way would any business continue selling a car like that with such comparatively lower volume. 

I realize what you’re asking is mostly rhetorical, but clearly, the answer is, more than that. I presume as low budget market segments that depend on volume, 13k a year isn’t enough if they’re selling way more CR-Vs.

Some people want to buy new. This is for people who haven’t put a lot of thought into it but somehow “know what they want.” *They don’t really, they just think so. 

I now have to figure out, with the Yaris and Fit both dead in the States, what to recommend to people who don’t have a lot of money or understanding of how to take care of a car.

Fuck the consumer base, not Honda. If we were buying them they’d keep making them. I think it’s more notable that they were stubborn enough to keep building Accord manuals on a 1% uptake rate. The C7 vette manual rate was almost 20 times that and GM killed that transmission anyway.

You would not believe (or maybe you would) how many arguments other Kotaku commenters laid into me when I said I respected how they reacted to their initial release fuck up.

I remember reading about and seeing educational TV in school about Biosphere 2. As I recall I felt disappointed when someone had an injury in it and broke the seal to have it looked at. Also, I think it was too small to balance its ecosystem properly but I thought it was a solid good faith effort, despite its warts.

Be…

Occasionally, it’s another car of a different formula that results in the same amount of refinement, although I could be splitting hairs here.