PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

WOULD YOU buy the car pictured below? I would certainly consider it very carefully. Nice looking piece of metal, I say. I like cars and I like cars that look good all together even more. GM says you can’t have this car. You’ll have to move to Europe. It is a five door, or hatchback, version of its much praised new Chevy Cruze. Tell them they are full of beans. They think they know better than we Americans what we will buy and what we won’t and they are dead wrong (they were almost dead a two years ago, too).

I would like to make a page of pictures of all the great cars you can’t buy in America. I will, if I get the time. Meanwhile, if you have a nominee for a car you’d like to see Stateside, send the name and country of manufacture to me. Thanks.

One reason I like hatchbacks is they are small cars with big car space inside. It is much easier to get things in and out and you don’t have to buy a big, fat ugly SUV to get that space. In fact. I would maintain that some hatches have more useable space than some SUVs, unless the two last rows of the Ute fold down easily.

I have a Ford Focus “five door” (the car companies’ way of avoiding the term “hatch”). I once got three bikes inside it for a trip to New York. In fact, I could get two bikes plus three passengers. There was no way I was going to get three bikes plus three people, so we bought a bike rack to get home. We have traveled with two bikes and three people, however, because the rear seat is 60/40 split folding.

Detroit, or at least GM, thinks people were so burned by hatchbacks in the 1980s that they won’t ever consider them again. BUT, almost every company has a small hatch on the market and they seem to be doing just fine. Volvo has one. Kia. Ford, Audi, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Suzuki, and Saab, just to name a few. This is a car segment that is not going away.

The car companies nearly killed the hatch market by flooding it with cheap junk in the late 70s and 80s, but it came back quietly on its own. In Europe, they are as common as croissant on a winter morning in Paris. Are the European people smarter than us or just more practical? Who cares? Give us some good cars that also have high mileage and good utility value, what say?

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