Honda is the guy selling umbrellas on the corner when it starts to rain. The lady selling flowers when you're late for an anniversary dinner. The vendor selling fire extinguishers when your underwear bursts into flames.
Shrewdly anticipating the utterly obvious and inevitable, Honda was ready for the recent surge in gas prices in all ways but one: It didn't have enough cars on the lot. Honda has had the highest U.S. fleet average fuel efficiency for the last 15 years and has, with admirable restraint, avoided stuffing gas-aholic V-8s into the trim little noses of its cars.
So when people started panicking about fuel prices this year, there were the brightly lit and cheerful Honda dealerships, arising like Homer's rosy-fingered dawn. I went by my local Honda store a month ago and it looked like it was hosting a cockfight.
The company's hottest product is the Fit, a small, modest, lumpen prole of a car that just happens to be one of the best-engineered vehicles on the planet. It tells us something fundamental about the changing tastes of the American market that Fit sales are up 73% this year, while you couldn't give a Cadillac Escalade away if you filled it with mermaids.
Honda has basically sold out of the 2008 model-year Fits and is rushing the new, redesigned 2009 models to dealerships now, a month earlier than planned. Honda projects that Fit sales in the U.S. will be around 85,000 units this year. I shudder to think how hard management is caning those poor devils at the plant in Suzuka, Japan, where U.S.-bound Fits are made.
The brief: The Fit is a subcompact hatchback, in the same aquarium with minnows such as the Nissan Versa, Scion xD and Suzuki SX4 Wagon. The base price for the 2009 Honda is $15,220 (including delivery) -- $600 more than the 2008 model. The top-shelf Fit, the Sport model with navigation and stability control, will sell for $18,760. And -- here it is, drum roll please -- the fuel economy is 35 miles per gallon highway, 28 mpg city for the base model, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The Sport won't do quite as well, with 27/33 mpg, city/highway. That's what bigger wheels and tires (rolling resistance) and spoilers and side sills (aero resistance) will do for you.
After spending a day test-driving a 2009 Fit Sport in and around Malibu and Pacific Palisades, I can report that the new Fit is slightly larger, vastly stiffer, noticeably more quiet and comfortable, and every bit as dorky-looking as the previous edition. Honestly, this thing couldn't get a date for the prom with duct tape and a burlap sack. But that's part of its counterintuitive charm.
