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Originally Posted by joveblue
I'd probably choose a small lightweight car, as long as the acceleration was decent enough to take up from lights and get up hills easily and so forth. I prefer something smaller anyway: they're sportier and easy to manoeuvre. My worst nightmare would be a big-arse 4x4 or something. My dream car at the moment would probably be something like a BMW 1 series.
If I needed the extra space for a family or something, I'd probably go with a hybrid. although I'd research it a bit more first.
Diesel doesn't really appeal to me. Although the milage is better, the carbon emissions aren't a huge amount better (I don't think?) and the exhaust is also dirtier. Also, I'm not sure on this one either, but don't they have worse acceleration?
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The current diesels are pretty good on running clean. It's a lot better than it used to be, these days. Diesels don't usually have a lot of horsepower but they usually have massive, disproportional amounts of torque.
And torque is what gets you up hills without having to downshift, so I like that aspect of diesels. I would say that most turbo diesels do have much better acceleration than small engined high MPG gas cars while maintaining better MPG at the same time. The Jetta TDi gets 42 MPG with 140 HP and 236 lb-ft of torque. That's better in every way than a car like the XB which has less power and worse gas mileage. It's probably worth noting that the XB is also cheaper, but that's all it really has going for it, IMO.
The BMW 128 costs a lot more, almost $30k for the base model, only gets 28 MPG at best, but does have more HP than the Jetta TDi for example. But this is what I meant by compromise; A car like the Jetta TDi is a good car to drive, it handles well and it accelerates well enough while getting fairly stellar mileage. I would only be looking at a 1 series if MPG weren't a concern at all.