Sports compact

A sport compact is a high-performance version of a compact car or a subcompact car. According to Motor Trend in a comparison entitled "Small, Fast, Fun", the sports compact car has to accomplish the multiple duties of a "family car" and a "daily driver" - thus having more than two doors and seating at least four passengers - while also being "fun to drive" on all roads and in town.

There is no precise definition and the description is applied for marketing purposes to a wide variety of models, but typical "sport compacts" are front engined, front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive coupés, sedans, or hatchbacks driven by a straight-4 gasoline engine. In most cases, they are versions of mass-market cars that are factory produced with additional features and upgrades. Performance-oriented sport compacts generally focus on improving handling and increasing performance by engine efficiency, rather than increasing engine size. Sport compacts often feature external body modifications to improve aerodynamics or house larger wheels.

"Econosport" is a rarely used term for a sport version of a small economy car.

A partial list of some of the sport compact cars is here.

Sport compacts remain one of the largest segments of the performance car market in Europe and Japan, and is seeing a resurgence in North America after declining sales in the 1990s.

Japanese manufacturers such as Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Subaru have continued to release new generations of sport compacts, such as the Honda Civic Si, Mazdaspeed3, and the Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V. General Motors and other American companies has responded with the Saturn Ion Red Line, the Pontiac G5 GT, and the Chevrolet Cobalt SS. Dodge released the Neon SRT-4 in this class, and later the Caliber SRT-4, high-performance versions of their respective models.

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Wikipedia