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" Countdown - Best Fun &amp;amp;amp; Affordable Cars:   Find out why each car on our top 8 fun and affordable list ranks where they do. Select a car below to begin.                                                                                                                                                                     Back in the day, telling your buddies you&amp;#039;d bought an economy car was a bit like informing them you&amp;#039;d sold your speed shop business to pursue a career as a wedding planner. There would be wincing, head shaking, face-palms of incredulity. And who could blame them? The mid-1980s econobox was tinny, frumpy and bog slow, upholstered with sticky vinyl and styled with the artistry usually reserved for cereal boxes.   Fast forward to today, and we have a wealth of stylish, sporty and affordable cars that achieve exceptional mileage yet still maintain a fun-to-drive quotient\u2014economy cars, without the economy-car stigma. So we&amp;#039;ve collected eight of our favorites that meet our criterion of a 30-mpg-combined EPA rating, put them through our instrumented test procedures, tortured their (mostly) all-season tires through an agility-testing autocross course, and ran each through a 97.2-mile fuel-economy loop, recording their average trip-computer mileage, as well as calculating the mileage ourselves with a fill-up and simple arithmetic. The loop, incidentally, included a mountain run over Southern California&amp;#039;s Ortega Highway with lots of full-throttle 3rd-gear sections, followed by an extended freeway cruise on Interstates 15, 91 and 5 to bring the mileage numbers back to respectability.            To determine our rankings, we&amp;#039;ve sifted the data through our Engineering Editor&amp;#039;s Fun Factor formula that combines performance parameters, price and mileage to arrive at a bang-for-the-buck champion. For this test, the values have been tweaked a little to emphasize both fuel economy and straight-line speed, and slightly de-emphasize price.   Here are the results, in order of ascending ranking. It just goes to show that there&amp;#039;s life after 30 miles per gallon. Up First:    Video window may take a few moments to load...           "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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