This let­ter appears in the Decem­ber 2011 issue of Auto­mo­bile Magazine.

I love writ­ing let­ters to the edi­tor. This is my 15th or 16th let­ter to get pub­lished in a national or inter­na­tional mag­a­zine. I get a buzz out of see­ing my name in print. Ego­tis­ti­cal? Maybe. (For­give me for that, if it’s true.)

Roughly the same amount of time it would take for you to com­ment on a blog post — and have 21 peo­ple see it — can yield a few more views, if your thoughts are pub­lished in a mag­a­zine. Print may be dying, but there is still a good num­ber of peo­ple who read printed mag­a­zines. Obvi­ously, I’m one.

If you’d like to read more of the dead Volvo story, it’s in my pre­vi­ous blog.

And here’s Ezra’s col­umn. The Decem­ber Auto­mo­bile Let­ters to the Edi­tor sec­tion had more let­ters about that col­umn than I’ve ever seen focus­ing on any arti­cle or col­umn before.

The Opel Corsa is the Euro­pean ver­sion of the USA’s Chevro­let Sonic.

The Corsa (shown) is a great lit­tle car. Our fam­ily of five did a day trip of 160 kilo­me­ters (100 miles) across Bel­gium and Hol­land with­out any prob­lem, in spite of the rel­a­tively small size. The feel­ing of qual­ity was evi­dent in all the con­trols, how solidly the doors shut and in my gen­eral per­cep­tion of the com­po­nents being substantial.

The Corsa/Sonic han­dles well. It was quite com­pa­ra­ble to the Ford Fiesta I drove a few days before dri­ving the Corsa.

Sadly, the Sonic has an ugly front end, but it’s still a good car — far bet­ter than the Aveo, which it replaces in the Chevro­let line-up. The Aveo was based on a rel­a­tively cheap qual­ity Suzuki.

A huge dif­fer­ence between the car you can buy in Europe and the USA model is more than cos­metic — the Euro­pean mod­els can be bought with diesel engines. In the 1.3 liter model we rented, I recorded about 43 miles per gal­lon. Accord­ing to Opel’s web­site,* the gas (petrol) model gets about 23% less fuel econ­omy. (And the Sonic will get even less fuel econ­omy than the Euro­pean gas model.)

I found the power from the small tur­bod­iesel to be more than ade­quate. We’re not talk­ing sports car ter­ri­tory, but it had more power than our Toy­ota Corolla, which has an engine that is almost 1.5 times big­ger than the Corsa’s.

I’m just sad that Amer­i­can cars don’t get such great small engines — when they are already being made and sold in the rest of the world.

And finally, here is a great arti­cle on why Amer­ica just doesn’t get diesel cars, from Auto­mo­bile Mag­a­zine. (It’s a PDF. And copy­right par­dons, please. And for­give the poor qual­ity of the scan; I spilled water on the page.)

* Note that this link is to the Vaux­hall Corsa, England’s ver­sion of the Opel Corsa.