Thursday, April 10, 2014

Car & Driver Reviews the 2015 Honda FIT

by Jared Gall of www.caranddriver.com

Ever meet someone with a college degree in packaging? It sounds like the kind of program that’s as much BS as it is worthy of a B.S. Give us a few old shoeboxes, some packing peanuts, and a year’s worth of other car magazines, and we’ll deliver your eBay wins free of scratches and dents 60 percent of the time, every time. 

But the Honda Fit has always proved that there’s a right and a wrong way to put together a package, and the Fit’s has always been right. For 2015, that right way has been revisited. The 2015 Fit gets a new platform, new engine and transmissions, and a new look. For the first time in the model’s U.S. history, it appears that aesthetics were a consideration. 

It looks so much bigger but is actually 1.6 inches shorter. It keeps the same height and is 0.3 inch wider. The engorged appearance comes from a dramatically altered body-to-glass ratio. The part of the car you can’t see through is much taller, even if the car itself is not. This gives the Fit a more substantial appearance. And it is more substantial, although only slightly. Curb weights, which range from about 2600 to 2700 pounds, are up ever so slightly over the old car’s but remain at the skinny end of the class. 

Honda says it’s using more high-strength steel than ever in this Fit, which means that, in spite of the small increase in curb weight, the car sees big gains in rigidity in major areas. With this, Honda expects passing grades in all NHTSA and IIHS crash tests. The latter would be a major win, as the Fit was one of 11 compact and subcompact vehicles that the insurance-company fear-mongering outfit deemed “poor” in its wicked sneak-attack small-offset frontal collision test last year. 

It’s Just a Small One…
It still displaces 1.5 liters, but that’s about all the new Fit’s four-cylinder shares with the old one. Now the engine is loaded with direct injection and dual overhead cams (whereas before it had port injection and one lobestick), and in addition to i-VTEC’s dual-profile cams, the 1.5 packs variable timing control. VTC does exactly what you’d expect based on its name, retarding cam timing at low rpm and advancing it at high engine speeds. There are oil jets to cool the underside of the pistons and a crankshaft that’s been lightened a claimed 27 percent through a 50 percent reduction in counterweights, from eight to four. An additional 13 horsepower and 8 lb-ft of torque, for totals of 130 and 114, respectively, don’t sound like much for all that effort, but it is just a 1.5-liter. EPA fuel-economy estimates range from 29 mpg city and 37 highway with the manual to 33/41 with the CVT. 

Like its engine, the Fit’s transmissions finally join the modern era. For manual buyers, this is a good thing, as it means a long-overdue sixth gear. For automatic buyers, it means a CVT. If you’re not sure if we think that’s a good or bad thing, you can stop now and save yourself a few grand by buying a Nissan Versa. Make sure you get the really cheap one. 

…But You Can Do a Lot with a Small One
As for the Fit, its enigmatic blend of minute footprint and megalopolis indoor space is retained. Step inside—“crawl” has never been the right verb for Fit ingress—and you’ll notice a dramatic reallocation of interior volume. What’s really changed is the wheelbase, and with it, rear-seat room. Spacing the front and rear axles an extra 1.2 inches farther apart and redesigning the rear suspension with shorter trailing arms allowed Honda to move the rear seat an incredible 4.8 inches farther back from the front. That’s awfully close to the difference between long- and short-wheelbase Audi A8s and BMW 7-series, and it nets rear-seat passengers greater legroom than they enjoy in even the limolike Accord. This is no less of a miracle than the packaging breakthrough that made the first Fit such a hit

The trade-off is in a significantly smaller cargo area, which drops from the past car’s 21 cubic feet (with the rear seats up) to 17, making what was once the segment leader only midpack. But that’s still vastly more voluminous than any affordable sedan’s trunk, and a single lever still drops the Fit’s rear seat to create a flat load floor. While again smaller than its predecessor’s (53 cubes compared with 57), the Fit’s cargo hold remains bigger than that of any competitor in our last roundup of the segment.

Sunshine, Lollipops, and…Letdowns?
We’ve always been enamored of the Fit’s packaging, and that’s been the cherry on top of an outstanding low-buck dynamic package. Even though the new car shuffles its priorities in the interior department, it loses sight of them somewhat dynamically. Especially in economy classes, there’s no turning back against the electric-steering apocalypse. Here, the rack-mounted electric motor takes orders from a sturdier steering shaft, but there’s no feel, and the helm is less precise than before. It’s slower, too, 13.06:1 compared with 12.7:1, which deflates the fun on turn-in. Many cars at the lower end of the market feel as if their steering columns were made of waterlogged wood, and you have to twist them tight and wring out the moisture before any force is transmitted to the front wheels. Although the Fit’s rack is muted and less immediate, it’s still progressive, with some effort buildup through turns. 

The Fit nonetheless has a playful chassis for an affordable stuff shuffler. There’s little roll, and trick dual-path shocks provide linear compression under normal loading and a sort of blow-off function that uses a secondary valve to allow quicker compression when encountering sharp impacts, keeping the body under control even when you smack a midcorner bump. Without the outgoing Fit Sport’s rear anti-roll bar, the 2015 model isn’t quite as neutral, but it’s still close to fun, and certainly closer to it than any of the nonexistent cars that offer a Fit-sized interior package at this price. 

More, but the Same
It’s the same story underhood. Even though more powerful, the engine is missing the aggressive edge that reminded the driver the previous Fit came from the S2000 company. The clutch takeup is softer, more vague, and higher than in the previous Fit. The transmission finally gets a sixth gear, but it’s the same ratio as the old fifth, and the final-drive ratio is the same, so there’s no calming of the engine on the highway. At 75 mph, it still turns about 3600 rpm. A Chevy Sonic’s fourth gear is about the same as the Fit’s new sixth; at 75 in sixth, the Sonic’s engine turns about 1300 fewer rpm. 

The CVT is the same unit as found in the Civic, where we also didn’t like it much. Here, there’s a Sport mode that mimics a seven-speed automatic, but it’s not a very good copy. Top-level EX-L trims add standard paddle shifters, but they’re entertaining only for as long as it takes you to realize they don’t do a good job of mimicking anything other than a dying automatic. If your traditional auto behaved this way, you’d drive it straight to the shop or maybe park it on the side of the freeway and call a tow truck. Why Honda thinks it’s a good idea to intentionally program a transmission function to work this way just shows how infrequently it expects the feature to be used by people who care. 

Who’s on Top? Honda Wants to Be
Honda is hoping the people who care about this Fit will be the same who cared about 71,073 Ford Fiestas last year or 85,646 Chevy Sonics (and 34,130 Sparks) or 117,352 Nissan Versas. Even though the Fit is a seven-time 10Best Car and a three-time comparison-test champion, it still lags behind most of its classmates in sales, moving 53,513 units last year. So Honda isn’t changing prices much compared to last year’s—the base car starts $100 higher, at $16,315—but there’s a load of new gear. Standard equipment includes cruise control, a tilting-and-telescoping steering wheel, a USB input, side and curtain airbags, and a rearview camera. Upgrade to the $18,225 EX, and you’ll add keyless entry and start; multiangle functionality for the rearview camera; a larger, seven-inch touch-screen infotainment system; and 16-inch aluminum wheels. For $20,590, the EX-L (“L” stands for “leather”) wraps the steering wheel, shifter, and seat trim in leather; heats the front seats; and makes the (not leather-wrapped) CVT standard. In the “ain’t it good to be king” seat is the EX-L with Navigation, which, for $21,590, adds navigation. And HD and satellite radio, but calling it the “EX-L with Navigation and HD and Satellite Radio” would have called attention to the fact that you have to spend more than $21,000 on a Fit to get satellite radio, whereas other competitors offer it as standard on less-expensive models. At least Honda, in this age of gray-scale cars, offers the Fit in Mystic Yellow and Passion Berry Pearl. Only three percent of buyers might like that, but 100 percent of people who write about cars and comment about them online will. 

Until now, Honda has been loath to market the car too aggressively, as it was importing Fits from Japan, a logistical and fiscal bottleneck. This new car, though, will be built at a newly completed plant in Celaya, Mexico. Honda hopes a wider Fit spigot will better align its sales in this class with Car and Driver’s order of things. We might be disappointed by the car’s slight dynamic drop compared with its predecessor, but it’s hard to complain about a car that is still such a complete package. Some competitors might have better chassis, some have better steering, and some just don’t look dorky. But nobody else has yet matched the Fit’s incredible versatility at this price and placed it atop a chassis that offers a modicum of fun. When it comes to packaging, the Honda Fit is still the master. View Photo Gallery

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