2024 Nissan Kicks Is the Kind of Car We Need More Of: Affordable

> totaled twice in a year

How did it happen twice?

A lot of it is political. A lot of people REFUSE to buy American cars (except Telsas) as a political point.

My Chevys have been unbelievably reliable, more so than my Toyotas, and the stats bear that out.

I don't get what you mean here. Why else would they have negative opinions of them?

Also, we bought a minivan in 2003, put 250,000 miles on it with no major repairs, got in an accident that totaled it, replaced it with a new version of the same model, have nearly 100,000 problem-free miles on it, and would buy the same model again if something happened to this one. Some people genuinely like their vehicles. I'd guess that most people do.

I regularly bought Toyotas growing up, following in the footsteps of my parents. We never had any major issues over decades.

I think Nissan's quality went downhill mid-2000s after their turnaround from near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s.

All of the pre-2000 Nissans my family have owned or that my friends have owned seemed to be pretty decent (I loved my 1996 sentra). I'm really only referring to some vague date shortly after 2000 where quality took a nosedive. Not sure why though.

I have a Nissan truck that has been quite good mechanically, but is rusting like a tin can. I'd be interested in another one but not unless they've improved their corrosion resistance.

I think it depends on the manufacturer. I have a Honda reaching higher mileage and it's a CVT and I love it. Never had one problem with it.

Also, I think this is one of those things where CVTs came out, there were a bunch of problems that popped up in the first 3-5 years with different manufacturers, and now those problems are largely fixed but it left people feeling apprehensive around it. Honestly, I think this CVT ICE car is going to be my last gas car anyway. It'll probably last me another 5 years easily and by then there will be even more options for cheaper EVs in the US.

There are multiple class action lawsuits and settlements with Nissan over their CVTs. My Versa with a CVT started dying around 70k miles. It had all its scheduled service. I brought it to a Nissan dealer, and paid for a transmission inspection, and they said it was totally fine, even though I regularly experienced it failing to shift (or slide, I guess) between gears while accelerating. Around 90k miles it stopped switching out of 1st gear while I was 400 miles from home. I brought it to a family friend mechanic, who showed me that the transmission fluid plug was covered in metal shavings.

CVTs, at least from Nissan are a black box. You can change the fluid, you can hook it up to a computer, but that's about it. There's no fixing them. When it's done you have to replace the entire transmission. I limped the car another 50 miles to a dealer and traded it in for a Chevy Cruze. I looked it up, and I was the only year model not to have a class action yet. Later there was, and I think they settled for a 500 dollar voucher towards a new Nissan. No thanks.

CVT implementations vary, and I think some people just prefer the feel of a torque-converted automatic, which is why some CVTs fake this.

Nissan, however, is famous for making garbage CVTs that have lots of issues at low mileages.

> Together, they have about 500km on them

I doubt that's what you meant to write.

1. The modern day version of the car on the right would also be vastly safer.

2. Imagine how great all those fuel efficiency technologies would be if applied to a much lighter vehicle.

I’m going tho have to disagree on these points.

> 1. the car on the left is 3x safer than the car on the right.

It might be marginally safer for the driver, but due to reduced visibility, it is less safe for pedestrians and cyclists.

Some carmakers take this to an extreme: https://i.redd.it/5b2ewauetf191.jpg

Here’s another example: https://i.redd.it/7vgq17y69m691.jpg. The fact that the front car is street legal is, frankly, a policy failure.

(The Mini is less egregious, of course, but having two of them highlights the differences more than having two different cars.)

> 2. the car on the left actually does have comparable fuel efficiency (feel free to google for fuel efficiencies of the original minis)

> 3. the car on the left is better for the environment due to more stringent (e.g.) EPA standards for production vehicles (well at least until trump rolled them back...)

Don’t you think that if we made modern cars the size of the right one, their fuel efficiency and environmental impact would be even less? Is it not a colossal shame that in 50 years, we have not improved on these parameters?

Safety equipment is heavy, and crash standards make cars bigger; “compact” cars are now much heavier and larger than they used to be.

There were 50 MPG Honda's in the 1990s.

I love my Corolla. 22 years old, 200k miles, runs perfectly fine. Never broken down on me. Even the interior is pristine, no rips in the drivers seat upholstery - something I’ve seen happen in a matter of years in other cars.

I felt bad when that story came out about Toyota engineers pulling the panels off a Tesla and being in shock. Sure, Tesla has done some amazingly innovative engineering. But the interior of a brand new Tesla is more rickety than my clapped out Corolla. Toyota engineers shouldn’t feel bad, they build cars that last, and that really matters to a lot of people.

Daihatsu Charade 3 cylinder diesel was the best fuel economy of any car I've ever owned including relatively modern hybrids. That thing more than once made me doubt if the fuel meter wasn't simply broken.

1L compact cars were not uncommon in Europe 10-15 years ago. Consumption was about 5L/100km (about 47mpg). Now they are being replaced with hybrids and electric versions.

Example: (German) Opel Corsa 1.0 3-cyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Corsa#Corsa_D_(S07;_2006)

Sure it was a rather small car, but it gets you to work just as well as F-150.

Oh and carburetor was definitely not part of the design lol.

My counter to all those conspiracy theories: China. They have smart engineers, too. If a 100mpg carburetor were possible, they'd be building the thing so they could cut their oil imports.

(Well, that and physics. We know how much energy we can extract from a gallon of gasoline, and no amount of cleverness can get around that.)

I strongly suspect that we could make equally protective, lighter weight crumple zones if we were designing for collisions with lighter weight cars. Excessive cabin protection is largely needed because bumpers on light trucks are at head level for passengers in normal cars. Weight is a safety factor independent of crumple zones and cabin protection because in a crash m1a1=m2a2, and you don't want to get caught with the smaller m.

I'm concerned that we're currently cranking out a generation of uniquely heavy and dangerous vehicles which future vehicles will have to share the road with for decades, perpetuating these dangerous design factors.

If we designed a new 5-seat sedan that could easily reach 90 mph, but which only needed to share the road with other copies of itself, I bet we could do it in 1000 pounds and it would be far safer.

If it existed, I'd love to own a 1-person car/motorcycle, and then rent an SUV the other 5 weeks out of the year.

Basically you end up with bicycle/motorcycle inside a teardrop shaped bubble... And limited speeds.

By point of reference, the Prius and the Honda insight came onto the market in 1997

It is a tragedy of humanity and the environment that the world regulatory bodies did not look at the design of those two vehicles in mandate that was in 10 years. All consumer vehicles should have a hybrid drivetrain.

Modern table stakes for a car should be a plug-in range of 50 miles, 40 mpg+ highway, and 40+ mpg city.

The fact remains the vast majority of ICE vehicles are still sold without a hybrid drivetrain. So is they toot around cities in stop and go traffic they're wasting all of their kinetic energy in brake/friction heat and not reusing it for the most energetically expensive thing it does: acceleration.

Most people don't even think about the sheer waste involved with a stop sign. The amount of mechanical work we waste with brake friction and the amount of energy to reaccelerate.

If any were reading the discussion about repurposing ICE engines for home generators, you can see that the design right there. You basically can't use an ICU as a generator for anything but like 10% of its output sustained because all it's cooling is designed around intermittent high power acceleration to get the car up to speed.

Think of all that wasted weight in the engine in the ICE drivetrain to do all that acceleration when much more compact hybrid drive trains can produce better torque and acceleration for most of that use case in consumer transportation.

If in one of those decades the US since the Prius was introduced, it's simply mandated the industry go over to hybrid drivetrains especially plug in ones, we would have been so much more resistant to fluctuations and petroleum costs.

And I don't even want to think about how long ago we actually could have done some sort of hybrid drivetrain in cars. This 1997 the formative arrival of the battery sufficient to be used in hybrid drivetrains?

Perhaps it was with notebook batteries in lithium ion, but could nickel-cadmium or lead acid also done the job?

I purchased a 2004 corolla off the lot and that bad boy is running smooth at 165k miles.

It's ugly as all get-out, for some reason people love hitting me, including a freaking semi truck on a double left turn that turned too tightly. I literally have a line going down the side of my car marking where the trailer rotated into me.

But you know what I like more than a pretty vehicle? Reliable, no car payments, cheap insurance.

Just maintain it well and those vehicles will last you a lifetime.

I'm a broken record but you can buy used Chevy Bolts with 20-30k miles for $18000.

That's about 10 cents a mile capital cost. And the electricity will cost about 5 cents a mile.

Agreed. SUVs must die.

In America torque matters more than horsepower and torque is what keeps you running at high speeds. In Europe horse power matters more as that is what accelerates you from a stop. What sells (and is marketed) in each country is different of course.

Yes, it has become stupid in the recent years. However I used to have a 72hp car that was totally capable of barrelling down the highway at 120km/h (~= 75 miles per hour).

So, I insist, 122hp isn't "little".