The 7th gen Fiesta looks very similar to the previous gen, that's true. Problem is, it looks worse right in the few "minute details" that changed, from the fried egg headlights right to the also-ran rear end design.
I'm talking more from a thermal efficiency standpoint. Sure, if the engine is underpowered for the size of vehicle, economy will suffer. This was the case with the I4 Toyota Sienna, which got worse mileage than the V6 model, while also being significantly slower. From a thermal efficiency standpoint, a turbo will allow the recovery of energy which otherwise would have been expelled as waste heat out of the exhaust and into the environment.
This is exactly it, except I hate cars that sacrifice driver involvement for comfort too. Even in the Automotive Dark Ages of the 1970s and 1980s, you had more driver involvement and more variety. The technology simply wasn't advanced enough for cars to become truly complicated, and you still had different approaches. You had your I6es, V6es, V8s, some higher-end European models even had V12s - and I don't mean Lamborghini high-end, I mean things like Jaguars that a normal person could almost aspire to. And yes, you had your turbo I4s, but they weren't all 1.4/1.6/2.0L eco-engines - usually they were sports versions of an engine already considered adequate by the standards of the time, so Chrysler had its 2.2 and 2.5, Mitsubishi had a 2.6, Ford had a 2.3. On top of which, throttle-by-wire wasn't a thing then, so no matter how slushy and awful the transmission was, or how undersized or strangled the engine, at least that engine was chained to your right foot and had no choice but to obey. Now, though, we have much more advanced technology combined with an attitude that if a car is loud inside or uses low-quality interior materials, it's the Worst Thing Ever. So car manufacturers have to turn their economy cars into little luxury cars while also hitting insane MPG targets, and the result is lowest-common-denominator garbage like the Chevy Cruze, trying to motivate 3000 pounds of sound deadening with an underpowered 1.4L turbo, or stuff like my mother's Dodge Journey, with its deliberate throttle tip-in delay that can become genuinely dangerous when trying to get out into close traffic. That's exactly the thing, though. Is efficiency, in the abstract, really a worthy goal, or should driving enjoyment be a consideration also? I believe it should, even in the beigest of family sedans. See, a lot of people say that cars can and should be boring because car enthusiasts are a minority, but what if that's exactly backwards? What if car enthusiasm is on the wane in society specifically because the current crop of mainstream cars doesn't have the emotional appeal the older models did, and so laying down and rolling over like that will only make us even more of a minority in the future? I'm inclined to think this is the case, thanks to my late grandfather. According to my mother, he was about the worst penny pincher in the history of ever, but somehow this straight-laced family man found some spare change somewhere to throw Cherry Bombs on the Plymouth Sport Fury he used as the family car back in the 1960s. Now granted, his tight purse-strings were apparently more out of selfishness than sensibility, but still, he would not have been considered a "car enthusiast", then or now, at least to the best of my knowledge, and he still glasspacked the grocery hauler, just for the heck of it. Can you imagine someone similar in this day & age doing the same to their Camry or Malibu? There's a point where boredom starts to square with efficiency the way drag squares with speed, and we've reached that point. Even if specific output is a worthy goal in a factory street engine (which I'm not convinced of), turbos are still the boring way of doing it. High-winding NA engines have an allure that a modern, "sensible", "comfortable" turbo can't match. Even an I4, usually the worst-sounding type of engine there is, can start to sound appealing once you get to 9000RPM and higher. Like I said - boredom squares with efficiency. Not necessarily. My Escort is built on the chassis of a Mazda Protege/Familia, so was designed to fit the Japanese compact car "box". Theoretically, however, the 2.5L V6 from a Probe/MX-6 should physically fit in the engine bay. The base engine is a 1.9, just not a very powerful one (Mazdas got a 1.5 or something for base models, sports versions of both used the Miata's 1.8L twin cam). So no, 2.0 is not too big for a compact car, especially the modern bloated breed of such. I'd instead say that anything under 1.5L is too small, and that's pushing it. An NA 1.3L is better fit for a subcompact, which is not an official class there but is still a valid category of car for comparison purposes. Fun fact: the Sunbird in my avatar is generally considered a compact car here in the United States. The base engine was a 2.0L I4, the upgrade (which I had) was a 3.1L V6. Yes, changing spark plugs on the V6 was a pain, and neither one was powerful for its size (especially the V6), but the massive torque made everything so much better, and it sounded 10X better than an I4 as well. On top of which, while it was never really the most stylish car ever, you park it next to the Escort and it looks like a freakin' Jaguar, simply because it was designed for use in the US where it could be wider and longer without incurring additional tax.
That's not just a matter of "power" and "size". It's exactly the reason why american vehicles rarely succeded in Europe: power is not enough to provide driving enjoyment. Great cars are enjoyable even with very little under the hood, thanks to involving handling, charismatic styling or whatnot.
Exactly. The most fun I've ever had behind the wheel is in a 1992 Mazda Miata with a 1.6 Liter I4 producing a whole 116 horsepower. That's less than a quarter of the power of the most powerful car I've ever driven, a Dodge Challenger SRT 392 with 485 horsepower, and yet the Miata was so much more fun.
Fine then. Consider a normal 90HP engine, and then a smaller, turbocharged engine with the same power, with the cars being equal in every other conceivable way. In that situation, I will take the larger NA engine every single time, even if it's less fuel-efficient, because it'll almost certainly be better to drive. That's what I'm getting at.
Consider a normal 90HP engine. That's 1.4 NA territory. A 1.2 turbo would produce more low-end torque, same power output, with virtually no difference in the way the vehicle drives. Application of soft-turbos makes sense with *small* engines (usually powering small urban commuters), which can then be just *a little bit smaller*. Often times, small turbos are significantly more zesty than the NA engine they replaced. The only endangered species in this process are thirsty NA V8s, but hey, that's the price we all have to pay for decades of "enjoyment". I think I can live with biturbo V6s done right in the meanwhile...
That's why I mentioned that my currently-running car was actually designed, in the first place, to fit that dimensional "box" and yet a 2.5L V6 should in theory fit in the bay. The later 3.0L out of a Mazda6 I don't know about; as far as I know no one's ever considered it seriously enough to worry about fit. Also, add another one for my list: The current Alfa Giulia. It has brake-by-wire. How about no! I mean, why would you even do that to a car?
Elon Musk is my waifu, so I support Tesla. But they need to flesh out their reliability issues. Also, who says that there is this magical barrier keeping people from competing with long lasting companies? Mercedes and BMW are barely any good anymore, everyone just wants the nameplate. Who's saying a person with billions of dollars cant try? Also, Electric/Hydrogen is the thing of the future. all of your fellow long lasting companies will all be EV producers within 50 years.
The Citroen Xsara Picasso. I can't even bring myself to post an image of it. And to think they had the cheek to name something so horrifically ugly after an artist.
Who the goddamn hell thought an crossover hatchback was an good idea? I'm looking at you, Toyota and Ford. It really bothers me with the idea of an hatchback styled after crossovers, which isn't that smart of an idea, and the style these car takes. It's horrible, and they need to end this trend as fast as they started it.
I really don't like most newer cars in general, they are very heavy, complex, expensive, and boring if they put a current engine in a lighter body they wouldn't have to work as hard to meet regulations, and it would be cheaper to produce.
Hate is such a strong word, but nonetheless it describes exactly what I feel towards these claustrophobic BMWs. I absolutely loathe these little pompous, street-legal bumper cars. They have all the drivability of a grocery cart with a broken wheel combined with all the reliability of the average politician's campaign promises and topped off with its 18-26 and suburbanite Mom demographic.
You can tell those cars are miserable, look at the grilles, it's like if you took away the lollipop from a seven year old, then told that seven year old that they would be confined to driving a crossover hatchback for the rest of their life...
