You have recently published more than one article about the fuel efficiency of certain older low curb weight cars (pretty much pre 2000 models). Do you have, or could you provide a list of these cars by make, model and years produced?
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I owned a ’97suzuki swift (rebadged metro) with a 1.3L and it was a great car for 3 years, bought it for $800 and required no maintenance until wiring gremlins arose that I couldn’t figure out after spending hours on it. I saved a ton of money by driving that thing. There is the metro as well as well as the ford festiva and aspire. Early 90’s civic hatchbacks (particularly the dx and the cx), early 90’s toyota corollas and geo prisms. I actually recommend prisms because they are essentially corollas but can be had for less due to them being badged/stigmatized a geo. I had 2 friends who had prisms that ran past 200k miles before dying.
To me the holy grail is the 92-95 civic hatchback CX, it has the smallest motor (1.5L) nonv-tec, 5 speed tranny and manual windows and locks but actually is comfortable for 2 people. Those cars are as simple to work on as any other EFI car, they shared a lot of the same parts as the other civics and many parts from earlier and later generations are interchangeable, (swap a tranny out of an LS integra to improve gas mileage by changing the gear ratios) you can also improve the luxury of them by swapping parts from many acura’s (seats from an integra offer better support). THe hardest part is finding one that hasn’t been “riced” out or have some frankenstein motor shoehorned into it.