If there’s such a thing as provenance in the $16,000-economy-car gene pool, the Honda HR-V has it. It’s rare that a class of vehicle just explodes into being with such wildly divergent looks and characteristics.
It rings in just shy of 30 grand, at $29,100. The Easy trim level is just the second of five tiers, but this one is loaded with Beats audio, a panoramic sunroof, parking sensors, and a rearview camera. From certain angles, the new-for-2016 Fiat 500X has the look of an embryonic Porsche Macan. Their sculpted bodies suggest an athleticism that, if realized, ought to give them a leg up on the box-car set. The Fiat 500X, Honda HR-V, and Mazda CX-3 serve as the rectilinear subset’s foils. Our four-wheel-drive LT checks in at $25,540. The $15,000 Sonic lends its platform and its 1.4-liter turbocharged four. After sales of the Buick Encore surprised the suits, General Motors made the call to start shipping the more affordable Chevy-already available overseas-to the States. Buick, of all brands, was one of the pioneers in the subcompact-crossover class. Still upright, but less of a cubist’s delight, is the Chevrolet Trax. With the test’s most powerful engine-also shared with the Fiat-sending 180 horsepower through a nine-speed automatic transmission, our Renegade Latitude 4x4 stickers at $26,360. All-new for 2015, the Renegade shares its platform with the Fiat 500X, right down to its 101.2-inch wheelbase. Like the Soul, the Jeep Renegade has the profile of a car drawn by a four-year-old-a short rectangle atop a longer one atop some circular wheels. It’s the only vehicle in this gathering that isn’t four-wheel drive, because Kia doesn’t offer it that way. Soul pricing starts just over $16,000, while the Soul + tested here-with its 164-hp 2.0-liter four, panoramic sunroof, keyless entry and starting, and heated and ventilated front seats-rings in at $24,750. Renewed in 2014, the Soul took first place in a previous comparison test and is also the market’s favorite, with the American public annually snapping up more than 100,000 of these Korean parcels. The segment leader, the Kia Soul, shares its underpinnings with the Kia Rio. Automotive archeologists of the future will find in the fossil record of the early-21st-century evidence of a similar explosion of new life-forms, with the emerging tiny-ute class being one bewilderingly diverse phylum.Īll six wee boxes here bear traces of subcompact-hatchback DNA. The lucky minority adapted, survived, and-skipping way ahead to the good part-became you and me. In the 550 million or so years since the Cambrian explosion, science tells us, just about every organism that ever existed has gone extinct. In the beginning, God may have created the heavens and the Earth, but it was Cambrian metazoan hookup culture that gave us the basis of most life-forms we know today. From the September 2015 issue of Car and Driver.
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