Hi all- I'm leaning towards buying a Mirage, but haven't bought one yet. I'm looking at the 5 speed manual. I had some questions that maybe someone on here might know the answers to.

I'll be putting about 1,000 miles/week on my vehicle. I just bought a used Ford Fusion. I like the car, but every time I fill the thing up, which is about every other day- and it gets about 20MPG- it stings a little. That's totally on me. I'd actually looked up the MPG on a fair amount of cars before I went and bought. The Fusion got like 23/32 city/highway mileage for a combined 26. However, I bought the all wheel drive version. I hadn't looked that up. I didn't think the AWD would be that big of a difference. I thought it might be a mile or so difference, with the benefit of having great traction in winter. DOH!!!

I was going to buy a different used car. Somewhere I saw that the Mirage got 50MPG. Basically that's a difference of 30 gallons/week. That somehow led me to looking at a new Mirage, to see how much an older one was losing value compared to new. I did a double take (in a good way) at the price of new ones. Instead of paying $6-8,000 for something that had 80-100,000 miles on it, why not just pay an extra $5,000 or so and get one new?

One thing that I'm wondering about is the new ones only get 40MPG. That's still pretty good, but it's not 50. That leads to my first question.

Were people getting 50 MPG with cars that only reported 40 on Fuel Economy sites? Or was there a drop off in the mileage per gallon of newer cars? From what I can gather, it was the 2014/15 year vehicles getting the 50MPG.

The next thing I'm wondering- and this may seem contrary to wanting great MPG, but can they handle 75MPH for 400 miles of highway driving? Part of my job is a 200 mile trip. Then 200 miles back. If I get 40MPG, that would still be great. The speed limit for most of the trip is 75, and I'd like to drive with the flow of traffic. Can the Mirage handle that ok without a drastic drop in MPG or putting too much stress on the engine?

How is it in winter? I had an HHR (I've had the Fusion about 2 months) and I loved it. Except when it snowed. Occasionally I'd get stuck on side streets. If it's bad, that's not a deal breaker. I have a mini van that does ok in snow. I'm just curious as to what to expect.

The last thing I was wondering is about how many miles can I expect out of the car if it's well taken care of? I'm pretty good at maintenance. I've driven over 1 million miles. Probably up towards 1.5 million. Other than a few flat tires and a starter one time- I've never had any vehicle failures on the road.

Thanks in advance for any responses.