An Aveo with a Pontiac badge is still a crappy car...

An Aveo with a Pontiac badge is still a crappy car...

This is just a name changing game. Nothing really new here.

"...27 mpg in the city and 34 mpg on the highway..."

1980 VW Rabbit diesel: 42 mpg in the city and 50 mpg on the highway. Some day we'll be able to make cars that get mileage as good they did as almost 30 years ago. Be brave, be innovative, think!

1980 VW Rabbit Diesel: Pollution equivalent to sitting on a coal power station smoke stack (a 1980 coal power station not modern, mind you). Safety of a tin can on wheels. Amenities of a wooden soap box racer. AND the fuel economy with the 2008 ratings (which this article bases the Pontiac on) would be closer to 35mpg city/43mpg highway. Some day people will learn to read before they speak...

So this is basically the Chevy Aveo? The article should have been clear about that.

Anything to increase market penetration of small, more efficient cars is a good thing, but again, 27/34 is really such a small incremental mileage increase, especially in such a small engine hatchback. The new Jetta clean Diesel sedan will even get better mileage, and in an arguably better, and larger vehicle.

I rented an Aveo once and it seemed like a fun little car, but for that size, I would have hoped for a model that would at least hit +39 or 40 mpg. The Honda Fit will give this car a run for its money.

"The small car segment has literally exploded..." -- Susan Docherty.

No: the small car segment has figuratively exploded. Had it literally exploded, there would doubtless be pieces of small cars segments scattered about. Perhaps then it would have groan dramatically.

Aveo or not, the more small cars GM gets to its dealerships (now Pontiac will have something to offer here) the better - the same goes for the total US fleet...IMHO.

I just don't get it? Why does a car this small not get better than 35mpg. Honda civics from the 80's that I drove routinely got 38 to 43 MPG on the highway.

The engine size and power are just about perfect. Now if they could just make the car body (weight) a bit smaller that would up the gas mileage into the 30 city , near 40 highway. With the weak US dollar these years, maybe they can make it cheap enough to actually compete against the Japanese.

There will always be some people who want a truly inexpensive car, but assuming one has the money, why would anybody buy this car over a Golf BlueMotion, which is bigger, nicer and more fuel efficient (apart from the fact that said Golf is not available in the US) or the new Jetta TDI (which is less efficient than the Golf BlueMotion, but still very efficient and actually is available in the US).

I think the plain old gas engine is going to fade out and be replaced by Diesels, hybrids, and ultra-efficient turbo-gas engines like the VW 1.4TFSI. The regular gas engine is coming up against its limits on efficiency and still isn't as efficient as other engines or as efficient as we really need. This Pontiac may be ideal for people looking for a very inexpensive new car, but somebody shifting out of something bigger and more expensive isn't going to opt for it. We're not going to make any real progress on lowering fuel consumption until we convince people currently buying large, powerful cars that there are reasonable alternatives and this Pontiac isn't one.

This is an Aveo with a different name ... nothing really new, just means distribution through a wider dealer network (and keep the Pontiac dealers happy).

True, the Aveo is an unremarkable car with unremarkable fuel consumption, mostly because it is way too heavy for what it is. People buy it because it's CHEAP. Probably the technology required to make the car light and still meet current safety standards, would cost more. For example, Yaris is more economical - but costs more.

Civic is more economical and weighs about the same (but is a bigger car) because the current engine uses the VTEC system to operate in Atkinson cycle at part load. The 1.6 Ecotec doesn't have that capability - nor does *anything* in current production outside of Honda (and BMW's Valvetronic). YES, before someone complains, Prius uses Atkinson, but that engine has no way of switching *out* of Atkinson cycle.

Friend's girlfriend has an Aveo. It's actually a decent little car.

I always love these dumb comparisons by know-nothing critics.

The mileage figures you "remember" are CAFE numbers from way back then; when the VW bug got all of 16mpg. The venerable 42HP Bug was one of the best milege cars around, in its day.

If you wanted to compute the mileage of today's cars with the same way they measured mileage back then, I'll be glad to do that for you.

Take the city mileage multiply by 1.13%; then multiply by 1.08%; then multiply by 1.20%, to get the Old City mileage figure. Applied to the 27mpg city figure of the G3, we get 35 mpg City.

Take the 34 mpg Hi-way figure and then multiply times 1.08% then multiply times 1.09% then multiply time 1.2% and we get 48mpg Hi-way.

To compute the combined figure take the difference between the city and hi-way figure and multiply times .4 and add that number to the City figure. 48-35 = 13, times .4 = 5.2mpg. Added to the City figure, the Combined mileage figure is suddenly 40 mpg gallon, combined.

So under the old way of figuring mpg for exactly this very same G3 car, with no changes, we have 35mpg City, 48 mpg Hi-Way, and 40 mpg Combined. And this car is 999 times cleaner than back then; has much better safety systems, and crumple zones, better brakes, and better side impact protection. The doors won't spring open on an accident, the safety belts and airbags make it much more likely that you would survive an accident. And the G3 is ahrdly the best of its sort.

Today only the biggest pickup trucks and truck SUVs get nominal mileage as bad as the venerable VW Beetle, (16mpg), did. And they use the extensively reduced mileage calculations of today.

I know you haters would never admit it, but the worst Suburban or Escalade SUV on the road today, that gets like 14 city, 18 hiway would translate to 20.3 mpg City, 25.4mpg Hiway and 22mpg Combined, under the old ways of measuring things.

That is only 29% better than a VW Beetle from the mid 1970s! We simply don't build the gas guzzlers today, despite your propaganda, that is so out of date. But we need to do better yet, and we are on the verge of significant increases.

For example, under the original methods of calculating mileages, the the two mode Hybrid Escalade goes to 20mpg times 1.5% city and 25 times 1.20% Hiway for a combined figure of 1.25% or 30mpg City and 31 Hi-Way. Nothing for sale in the USA in the 1970s, got that kind of mileage.
And these are the figures of the biggest and worst mileage vehicles of today. Everything else sold is much better.

We've come a long way in 35 years, and many of you don't even know it. Sad, how ignorant you are...

Just last week some lefty poster here, actually said that the EU has equal or better emission regulations, when they are not even in the same ballpark. And decades from getting as strict as, in force, US air emission regulations. When I Dared him to compare the standards side-by-side, offering the US and Carb standards, he was never heard from again.

O.K.- Someone please explain the following:

1. What measures have been taken to enable the larger/heavier/more powerful Cobalt/G5 twins to achieve 37mpg highway highway ratings? The 2.2 liter Cobalt/G5 has a 37.5% larger displacement engine (2.2 vs. 1.6), weighs 648lbs more and yet offers 9% better fuel economy than the smaller Aveo/G3!

2. Why hasn't GM applied these "magic" measures to the rest of their light vehicle fleet?

Thanks in advance.

I'm not sure where you got your algorithems stas/stan but the way i calculate my mpg is with the trip odometer and the gas pump. These magical new technologies tell me i get ~33mpg in my 1994 accord wagon, which by the way is a 2.2 liter 4cyl and has at least double the cargo space of the cookie cutter pictured above.
"We simply don't build the gas guzzlers today, despite your propaganda, that is so out of date"
Then why o why is hundyi bringing out a "luxery V8 Suv"
instead of a hybrid? The only things out of date are the moron executives at most car companies who continue to deny the paradigm shift that began YEARS ago. Please refer to latest post/graph showing mpg and horse power trends to see how "We've come a long way in 35 years",and stop spouting your political rants stas.

The Aveo needs to stay where it is, on the bottom rung of the Chevy lineup. It's a good car for what it is - basic transportation. All this badge engineering is going to do, is further denude the Pontiac name - a name that used to be associated with cars aimed for performance.

I think I'll wait for the 5-door Yaris... gets better mileage and looks better