Face it, you are what you drive – at least to some degree.

Even if you see your car as just another appliance (for shame!), you’re still projecting an image when you wheel into that prime space at the local mall. As a reviewer I have jumped from a new Jaguar Vanden Plas with sheepskin floor mats into a new Kia Optima with little more underfoot than a creaky chassis. Trust me, your outlook changes. Other drivers react to you differently.

John Lasseter, director of the Pixar film “Cars,” recently told NPR how easy it had been for him to imbue those animated autos with personalities. Since childhood, he said, he had always seen cars and their drivers as complementary parts of single organisms. Larry the Cable Guy, for example, is Mater, the rusted-out tow truck.

So, are you ... Smart? Or do you plan to be by 2008?

DaimlerChrysler recently announced that in that model year, it plans to sell the next generation of its 8-foot-long, $15,000 (for now), 60-horsepower (for now) two-seater in the United States. The automaker reportedly plans to sell the Smart ForTwo automobile in 30 to 50 dealerships around the country. (A handful of Smart cars were independently imported from Europe by a little California company called Zap, before DaimerChrysler made its move.)

An auto-industry analyst in Germany recently told Bloomberg.com that the carmaker would probably consider the introduction a success if it moved 20,000 of the flyweight vehicles. (They weigh about 1,600 lbs., in case you were wondering. A Mini Cooper, by comparison, tips the scale at about 2,500 lbs.; a Suburban, more than 5,500 lbs.)

Some observations: Fuel mileage for the Smart – once it’s fully legal on US roads – will be about 40 m.p.g. Not bad, but not exactly revolutionary in the age of hybrids from Honda, Ford, and others. 

Smart’s cargo capacity? Go ahead and pack your toothbrush. Safety? The car has passed European crash tests – which are rigorous – but I’m not sure a Smart is what I want to be sitting in if I get rear-ended by a Sequoia or an Armada.

A car-testing colleague wrung out a Smart on an Interstate recently. He says he found it surprisingly stable. “There were lots of other cars around going too fast, trying to pass me to get a better look,” he says, “and that was scary.” The engineering of the Smart makes it a better highway bet than, say, the old all-electric Corbin Sparrow.

Will cities incentivize ownership – as they have begun to do with hybrids – with special lanes and lots? (I’m based in Boston, arguably a fairly progressive place, and we have trouble just getting a tunnel that doesn’t leak.) Will Smart become the darling of the ZipCar set?

Can a nation that has moved airlines to install wider seats embrace a car this small? Can you? Let us know.

- Clayton Collins

So you’ve overcome the argument about how the extra up-front cost of a hybrid vehicle takes too long to recoup (despite IRS incentives and unrelenting $3-a-gallon gas).

You’ve shrugged off concerns about long-term battery life – and even come to terms with the fact that no cheap, safe, hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle is going to show up in great numbers in the next few years.

Hail to thee, gentle hybrid-vehicle driver. You deserve one of those coveted “hybrid parking only” spots and a cash reward from your forward-thinking employer.

True, hybrids are not the only gas-saving game in town. Promising developments in alternative fuels keep coming fast – from “clean” petrodiesel to various blends of biodiesel to straight vegetable oil (SVO) to cellulosic ethanol and other fuels made from byproducts and waste. Volvo now has a prototype vehicle that can run on five different fuels.

An alt-fuel hybrid might ultimately be one way to go.

Current gas-electric hybrids aren’t perfect, but they’re here (in a broadening array) and they pay you back pronto for emitting fewer hydrocarbons. I just spent a week in a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid after a guilty stint commuting alone in a high-riding V-8 Chevy Tahoe – and I was pretty inspired when I looked in my wallet at the end of it.

As with other hybrids I’ve driven, the car almost immediately affected the way I drove. An odd phenomenon occurs when you realize that you can take small steps that lower an already reduced burn rate. Obviously, less combustion equals less consumption. So you want to keep the spark plugs from sparking.

Say you’re in a “pure hybrid” like a Toyota Prius or Ford Escape and you stop at the back of a long line of cars at a tollbooth. The car ahead of you moves, and a gap opens. Instead of just stepping on the gas and closing it up, you delicately take your foot off the accelerator and the electric motor does all the work. You’re cutting into the “foreign-oil dependency” you’re so tired of hearing about.

Of course – and I’ve seen this happen – the driver behind you might move his hand (the one not holding a cellphone) to his horn. So check your mirror before you turtle along; there’s no point generating hybrid backlash.

Some drivers alter habits in other ways. A friend in Los Angeles boasts about “feathering” his Prius’s engine at highway speeds by establishing momentum and then laying off the gas, applying only the slightest pressure to ensure that any needed boost is electric-powered. Late one night on a stretch of the 110 freeway, he says, he soared along at about 70 m.p.h in full electric for a couple of miles.

This works to some degree with the Civic Hybrid, too. Thanks to its valve engineering, its electric-assisted gasoline engine can turn without firing when the driver eases off the throttle while headed down a gentle hill. (There’s a thrill that comes with watching the “assist” meter run right up to its peg.)

Drivers can become downright obsessive. Take, for example, this post on a 2004 cars.com forum: “While I have ALWAYS used coasting in neutral down hills to extend mileage, I have refined the technique lately. I now also create “virtual hills” of velocity on ALL grades. The net result is, I now drive LIKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST. Namely, I apply thrust in PHASED BURSTS, to projected optimum velocity (sometimes tweaking speed limits), then simply coast down. Done properly (and traffic permitting) my engine is IDLING much of the time.”

There are less radical tactics: You can go easy on the air-conditioning. Or look into tires with “low rolling resistance.” (These are not necessarily great in snow.) Of course you can always just employ the basics that predate hybrid technology: carpool and drive off peak.

Are you a hybrid owner who has honed a few tactics – short of making warranty-busting modifications – for reducing fuel-burn beyond what your vehicle does on its own? Write me.

And check out our last automotive post.

by Clayton Collins

A quiet back road out past the horse farm; conditions are dry. I stop, then drop the clutch at high r.p.m. The 3,500-lb. Legend Lime Mustang GT sits back hard on its haunches, showing me some "wheel hop" as the tires grip and release, leaving the asphalt for tiny fractions of a second before taking hold.

Relax, this is business. Mostly.

Convertibles beg to be tested for structural rigidity. Without a hard top, they tend to flex. This one, a 300-h.p. V8, shudders - but only a little, not exactly a Labrador retriever straight from a lake. I give it a passing grade.

Something about a Mustang can convert even a car reviewer who's partial to the Prius model of fuel efficiency and the performance characteristics of tight new 2-liter European sport compacts like the Audi A3.

That "something" is power. If you like to drive - don't apologize - then you probably like feeling pressed back in the seat from time to time. But how much is enough to deliver a little exhilaration without getting an average adult driver into trouble?

A power-to-weight ratio comes into play: This Mustang, for example, applies roughly one horsepower to every 11 lbs. That's a spirited pony. Those V-8 pickup trucks and SUVs you see on the highway need considerable horsepower - and wheel-driving torque - to get under way and keep going.

Your family car needs less of each - though families that haul hockey teams or horse trailers are obviously well served by a little more muscle. A rising issue for car-shoppers: When automakers launch new models or redesign old ones to deliver that desired interior space, they sometimes work from existing platforms, and they sometimes use existing power plants.

Subaru's quirky B9 Tribeca, for example, is at its core an Outback - albeit one with the most powerful Outback engine available. Yet Tribeca weighs about 600 lbs. more than the wagon; we found the result just adequate.

The new, bigger Volkswagen Passat's 2-liter four-cylinder seems to offer power aplenty for the bigger 2006. But the Toyota RAV4 - considered the first "cute ute" when it was introduced in 1997 - was upsized considerably for 2006, and frankly feels a little sluggish in a highway merge, at least in its 4-cylinder form. (The V6 is reportedly much more sprightly, and might be Toyota's snappiest whip.)

You won't find power-to-weight printed on a sticker at the dealership, and there are mitigating factors that involve weight distribution and other acts of engineering. But as a general rule of thumb, a vehicle that weighs in at 3,500 lbs. or so and offers an engine in the 200-h.p. neighborhood should deliver what you need, often with decent gas mileage.

Some kinds of performance don't require much fuel-burn at all. If you're committed to the gas-electric hybrid model, remember that a car like the 2,800-lb. Prius makes more than half of its 110-or-so horsepower with its assisting electric motor - and that makes it a torque-happy drive, very quick off the line. And BMW's recent advances with "super capacitors," versus batteries, mean that some vehicles with voltage will also soon be shaving weight. Worth watching.

Disclosure: This might discredit me as your car guy, given all the jokes about the marquee, but in the warm months I play around with my 1979 Fiat Spider - a little more than 80 h.p. and around 2,300 lbs., minus whatever has rusted off - and still wring out a lot of fun. My 18-year-old is one of those after-market modifiers; his 1989 Mazda RX-7 sits on big Racing Hart rims (his rear wheels are 10 inches wide) and his N1 exhaust lets me know late at night when he's home.

Want to share what works for you and yours in the automotive realm - a make to which you're committed, a pimped-out ride of which you're proud, a thirst for alternative fuels? Give us a shout. Over the engine noise, we'll be listening.

By Clayton Collins