Entry-level fun

I had a great experience at the New York International Auto Show. I got to meet and interview Carroll Shelby, the man behind the Shelby Cobra and the GT-350 Mustang, still going strong at 81 despite both a heart and kidney transplant. He has a new Cobra prototype and fresh ideas about developing the car of the future.

I was able to finally see and drive the 2005 Ford Escape hybrid. I found it very impressive, and would hope that it could easily meet the conservative 20,000 sales target set for it by Ford. I’ll have more on Mr. Shelby and the Escape hybrid in future columns.

I also saw lots of huge SUVs at the auto show, with the Nissan Pathfinder Armada making a particularly large impression. That sucka is huge! Big SUV sales topped 850,000 in 2002, so it’s no wonder Nissan wanted some of that gravy. The Armada (built on the same platform as the appropriately named Titan pickup) is more than 17 feet long and 5,300 pounds. Yours for a mere $46,000!

Despite the appearance of these giants, SUV owners are alarmed that Washington is going to step in with tough fuel-economy laws that will castrate their big rigs. According to a hyperventilating SUV Owners of America, "An SUV that looks like an SUV but has been gutted of needed performance features would be of no use to millions of American families and businesses that want — and need — comfort, hauling capacity, enhanced safety and the ability to tow a trailer."

But how much towing do people really do? To borrow an analogy from the Sierra Club’s Dan Becker, it’s like buying a catering hall in the expectation that your 10-year-old daughter will need it for her wedding.

But rather than bash SUVs, I want to celebrate a brand-new small car, one that got very little attention in New York. The Chevy Aveo, designed by the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Italdesign in Turin and built by Daewoo in Korea, is new for 2004, available as a four-door sedan and a five-door hatchback. It’s really teeny, just 13 feet long and weighing only 2,369 pounds. I parked it next to a Suburban and it looked like a kiddy car.

The Aveo gets exactly double the Armada’s fuel economy, 28 mpg in the city instead of 14. Despite its tiny size, it has a reasonable amount of room in the tested five-door version. The back seats accommodate my two growing girls, and with the rear seats folded down there is 42 cubic feet of storage space.

The revelation for me about the Aveo (with pricing starting at $10,000 for the stripped Special Value model) was its nifty handling. I’d forgotten how much fun it could be to pilot a very small car around a city, zipping around obstacles and nosing into parking spaces larger cars just passed over. The Aveo is actually more fun to drive in the asphalt wars than the Mini Cooper, which let me down with its heavy steering.

Is the Aveo automotive perfection? Of course not. The bumper-to-bumper warranty is short at three years, 36,000 miles. The shift gate on the four-speed automatic is balky. The CD player handles MP3s, but it’s fiddly and sounds tinny. The electric control for the mirrors handles only the right side, an odd economy.

There was a time when companies like Ford and Chevrolet actually built small cars (remember the Chevette?), but we’re talking about less than 10 percent of the vehicle market here and Detroit can’t be bothered. Still, almost a million small cars are sold in the U.S. every year, and that’s a share worth going after.