car

I have a new car. It's a 2008 Honda Fit Sport. I have had it for four months, during which time we've put on... wait for it... 842 miles. That works out to about 210 miles a month, at which pace we'll reach the first scheduled (100,000 mile) tuneup in about 39 years. Now we do need a car for some longer trips. My family is (mostly) about 3 hours away, and my girlfriend's family is (mostly) about 2 hours away, at which distance Zipcars are impractical. We did the math, and there was no combination of Zipcars and traditional rentals for frequent trips of that distance that came out any better than owning. So we started looking for a used car. The Fit was my first choice, but they have only been available in the States for about 18 months, so there was a dearth of used stock. We drove some other cars, but the Fit is ridiculously well designed. It's very Japanese. The designers started with a full-size, practical interior and wrapped the minimum amount of car around it. It has a tiny footprint for city driving, but a rather tall roofline, so the space you lose on the sides you gain to to bottom, for about the same net interior space as many midsize wagons. There's a very small class of things that would fit into an SUV and not into this car. The rear seats fold perfectly flat for a huge usable area; no weird bumps or seams. Plus it's way fun to drive.

I know I sound like I'm shilling for the car company, but it's not that... I just love when tools are well put-together and well thought-out. The Fit is such a success as a practical design object, you wonder why there aren't more cars like it.

The whole "new car" thing got me thinking about carbon footprint and the like. The Prius is a great car in this regard, but expensive. And at 37mpg, the Fit's got near-hybrid mileage for a lot less than a Prius (in fact, it's one of the cheapest new cars on the market). We're intending to keep this car for a long time, and gas doesn't look like it's getting any cheaper or cleaner.

But the biggest impact on my carbon footprint is that first number: 220 miles a month. When our old car died, we sorta became involuntarily car-free, and it's been pretty remarkable how few trips really need a car now that we have one that works properly. Here's where we've driven so far: a couple of visits to my dad in a town ill-served by mass transit, hauling a new computer home from the store, grocery shopping on winter days when the weather really sucked, and taking a bunch of my framed art to a show.

Here's the lesson: it's not suffering, or dogma. On any given day, I pick the best tool for the job. For most trips (commuting to work, getting groceries), that's the bicycle. Second choice is the subway or walking. The car fits in where needed and I don't really have a lot of guilt about that. It just struck me, after 4 months with the new car, how natural and easy it is to work with less. I honestly can't imagine ever needing more car.