One thing small cars have in spades though is "fun" handling, BUT, you can very rarely take advantage of that in North America, with very few areas of "twisties" and meandering country roads. In Europe, it's like that all over the place, no grid system, roads followed contours or ancient "mule trails" or geographical features, or wound their way between fields, spread out in star formation from towns and villages, etc etc, the last people to have an organised road network in Europe were the Romans. Find any long straight bits on European roads and it was either done in the last 10 years, by fiat and siezure of lands, or it's on top of an ancient Roman road*.
Well understanding that you see that small cars with "gokart" handling are much more "fun" in Europe than they will ever be in the US, apart from pure city driving, and even then, in busy cities where you have to wait for pedestrians at intersections etc, and have to assume every other driver is drunk, stoned, deaf and blind, good handling isn't as much fun as it might be, you only get any driving satisfaction from being able to park easily. Add to that that big city streets are 50% potholes and 50% in use or abandoned tramlines and you kinda tend to want something with suspension that feels like it's not shaking the car apart when you go over them...
So, small cars have allll that against them in North America, and gas prices are gonna have to be double before many people will take those compromises without the "rewards" that Europeans get...
For example, back in the day in the UK, I had a car about Omni/Horizon/Golf/Rabbit sized. It had all of about 65HP and a 4 speed box, it was quite light, and came from the same "wheel at every corner, transverse engine" philosophy as the original Mini, it had the "big" version of the mini engine, 1275cc A series, well an A+, it was improved a touch. On two occasions driving it was particularly delightful, one was a long winding minor A road, 12-15 miles of short straights and tight corners, I got a "press on" driver behind me in a V8 Rover, now it's all double lines up the middle of the road, no overtaking for the whole way, and I know the road pretty well, so I decide to have some fun with him. I was cornering it at 50mph double footing it into the corners, and accelerating out as hard as I could, every time I went into a corner the rover was right on my ***, but coming out of every set of twisties, he was nowhere to be seen... then about halfway down the straight I'd see him come out, and the nose would go up as he floored it, and he'd catch right up and bury the nose again as I went into the corners far harder than he could....
Another time, I was in the Yorkshire dales, had to go up the side of a moor, road was very twisty and uphill about 1 in 4 in places, think of a section of pikes peak hillclimb, similar stuff. Had an SE6B, Reliant Scimitar behind me, considered a "real" sports car, had 2.5X my power for the same weight, I decide to "go for it" and start screaming up the hill in 2nd and 3rd, and he joins the game and is staying fairly close, but after 5 or 10 minutes of this his passenger is white faced, and he drops back... we pull over on top to read a monument... and have got out the car, walked over, read it, and are just getting back in when the Scimitar passes, the driver shakes his head and grins at us...
Those are the fun times in having a small car...
And this one time, at band camp, I came down the side of a mountain with the front brakes on fire, handbraking it round the hairpins, but that's a story for another time
Just mentioning it for the point that some bigger cars would have killed me that day.
(*By the way, that makes for much better quality road surfaces, in some places the road bed is near 10ft deep, no subsidance to worry about, potholes only generally break through the "last layer" and they're cheaply "reskinned" with another inch of asphalt. Actually they seem to prepare new road beds a lot deeper over there too, going down 2 or 3 feet instead of 1.)
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