Summary:
This is an extremely efficient and versatile vehicle, which I would highly recommend to anyone
Faults:
The car has been reliable and had no issues whatsoever. Well, it's still less than a year old.
General Comments:
The car gas meter shows 41.x mpg for my commute... usually mostly highway at 60 mph. Manual calculation usually results in half to 1 gallon worse fuel consumption, still exceptional though.
The lack of decent arm rests makes the sitting fairly uncomfortable if you want to rest your arms.
The sun visor is insufficiently long, so it does not protect you from the shining sun when in the side position.
Other than that, the car is phenomenal. Very stable on the highway, the engine runs so smooth that I cannot feel any vibration in the steering wheel or the shifter with the engine running at idle.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Yes
Review Date: 30th October, 2010
26th Jan 2011, 22:43
The Fit is too expensive. I'd go with a Toyota Yaris. They're very reliable and fuel efficient.
29th Jan 2011, 06:11
I like the Fit in spite of being used to much larger cars. My wife bought one for around $16,000 plus trade-in on her Saturn Vue AWD after the CVT transmission started slipping. She bought it in December of 2009, and has put about 25,000 miles on it.
It is a surprisingly roomy car for being so small, and I like the maneuverability and ride. It is one of those rare small cars that rides like a big car.
The interior is tasteful for a cheap car, the seats are comfortable, and the ride is much better than the Civic that we also test drove. When the Civic hit a pot-hole, the car kept bouncing long after that pot-hole was behind you, but the Fit seemed to dampen the jouncing much more quickly. The Civic was surprisingly cramped, and I banged both knees twice getting in and out, while the Fit's cabin is much roomier on both the driver's and passenger's side. With the rear seats folded down, it carries a surprisingly large amount of stuff -- luggage, camping gear, even the odd bookcase.
She feels that the handling in snow and slush is more confident than her previous AWD Vue, and she feels more confident about driving the Fit because of the smaller size. Despite the recent heavy snowfalls in the Northeast, the Fit has made it to work and home every day, so it is doing a good job.
We took it on a roughly thousand-mile trip across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and down Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway to Tennessee and the car did great. I even enjoyed driving it. It handled great on the curves and with the gas mileage it is a great cross country car. I believe the best mileage she has gotten is 41 mpg, although we noticed that driving across the Appalachians of West Virginia at interstate speeds, gas mileage dropped pretty markedly, down to 32 mpg. She says this is the lowest that she has ever gotten, and the engine was working pretty hard to maintain 70 mph up some of the hills. She is very gentle with her cars, so on some of the steepest hills, instead of trying to maintain speed we'd just do whatever speed correlated to keeping the rpm's down to 3,500, even if that meant doing 55 mph in the truck lane. I also didn't see any reason to flog the little 1.5 liter doing 70 mph uphill in lower gears.
I personally really like the indigo-colored accents on the instrument cluster, and the little porthole windows adjacent to the dashboard, and I like the little bumps on the headlight assemblies. They don't necessarily serve any purpose that I can see, but they make the car fun. So, there are no agonizing, sleepless nights of worry that she should have bought something else, least of all a Yaris, which was never in consideration.