ATTENTION, Americans: This is a test. Now that even President Bush has pronounced the nation “addicted to oil,” and even as hybrid-car sales boom while S.U.V.’s swoon, here come new opportunities to test your willingness to use less gasoline. You can now drive the latest wave of smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles, the so-called “B class” cars that are popular in most of the rest of the world.

Two fine examples are the Toyota Yaris, which went on sale a few weeks ago, and the Honda Fit, which becomes available next week. Set aside any lingering pint-size prejudices — these new subcompacts are not stripped-down penalty boxes like the economy cars of yesteryear. They are neither cramped nor bereft of creature comforts. They are even a bit stylish.

With prices in the $12,000 to $15,000 range, the Fit and Yaris — along with Chevrolet’s Korean-built Aveo, Nissan’s coming Versa and redesigned small cars from Hyundai and Kia — offer an alternative to gas gluttons, or simply a way to save some money.

To get acquainted with the new Honda and Toyota, I and my husband — also an auto writer — drove them back-to-back for two days across Southern California. We darted through bustling Santa Monica streets, along crowded Los Angeles freeways and up lonely two-lanes to Joshua Tree National Park. At night, we sped across the flats to Needles, near the Arizona border, before high-tailing it back to Los Angeles.

The Fit and Yaris are new to America but familiar to much of the rest of the world. Honda introduced the Fit in Japan in June 2001. About six months later it went on sale in Europe with a different name, the Jazz. Now the Fit/Jazz has been redone for the American market, growing 6.6 inches longer to meet United States crash-protection standards. Tetsuya Nomura, the car’s chief engineer, said the suspension was reworked to improve ride and handling.

The Fit comes in one body style: a hatchback with four doors. The smallest and least expensive Honda car in America, it slots below the Civic (which has grown considerably over the years). The Fit is nearly 20 inches shorter and 3 inches narrower than the Civic, but it is 3.5 inches taller.

The first-generation Yaris went on sale in Europe in 1999. Called the Vitz and the Platz in Japan, it was sold in the United States as the Echo, though with its odd-shaped high-set body it never found much of a following. The redesigned 2007 Yaris is longer, wider and much more stylish, and it has new mechanical underpinnings.

Positioned below the Corolla, the Yaris comes as a two-door hatchback or a four-door sedan. The Yaris hatchback is 14 inches shorter than the Echo and about 20 inches shorter than the Yaris sedan.

Both the Yaris and Fit have 1.5-liter 4-cylinder engines, with the Fit rated at 106 horsepower and the Yaris at 109. Both come with five-speed manual transmissions, though the Fit we tested had the optional five-speed automatic; the Yaris had a four-speed automatic.

The cars look quite different. I preferred the Yaris, with its simple, rounded and calm lines. Visually, the Fit seemed busy.

To me, the Yaris’s design edge continued inside. Toyota’s finely textured seat fabric seemed more sophisticated than Honda’s. The Yaris’s center-mounted gauges looked cleaner and more modern than the Fit’s stacked controls.

In both vehicles, front occupants sit somewhat high, providing a good view down the road by small-car standards. But the Yaris’s roof pillar impedes over-the-shoulder visibility.

It didn’t take long in the Fit to realize that Honda is one of the few automakers to master the art of electric power steering, which saves weight and improves fuel economy by using an electric motor instead of a hydraulic pump and hoses. While electric steering usually feels light and numb, the Fit’s seemed natural. With just the slightest turn of the steering wheel, the Fit responded. The car felt playful and eager.

The Yaris was slower to react and felt softer and less agile over all, even though it is 225 pounds lighter than the Fit. But the Yaris’s ride was smoother, with a suspension that did slightly better at isolating the driver from the knocks of broken pavement.

Both test cars had 15-inch wheels and tires, although 14-inchers are standard. We tested the Fit Sport, but Honda said its suspension was tuned no differently than other versions.

When it came time to slow down, the brake pedals of both cars were softer than I like, but I grew accustomed to them.

While the two cars have small engines, their sophistication helps to compensate for their size. Still, there were times when merging onto a busy freeway, or trying to switch lanes, that I wished the cars had a bit more oomph. Once on the freeway both merrily cruised with the flow of traffic, at 75 to 85 m.p.h.
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The Fit’s five-speed automatic transmission was a bit quicker to downshift than the Yaris’s four-speed unit. Our Fit also had an entertaining feature: paddles behind the wheel let the driver upshift and downshift manually.

Despite their size, these hatchbacks are models of functionality and flexibility. The Fit, with four doors, was far easier to load and unload than the two-door Yaris.

Toyota says the cargo capacity of both the Yaris hatchback and sedan is 12.8 cubic feet, though the hatchback space swells to nearly 26 cubic feet when the split back seat is folded flat. (The rear seat also reclines and slides forward and backward.)

That movement makes the Yaris quite flexible, though with the back seat in the far-forward position only a child could sit there comfortably.

As good as the Yaris is in many respects, the Fit is the hands-down winner in space flexibility and cargo hauling. The Honda has a lower floor, which helps to explain its larger space (42 cubic feet) when the rear seat is folded.

The Fit’s split rear seat works four ways in addition to the standard upright position. The rear seats can “dive” down to the floor, creating a flat cargo space without any need to remove the head restraints. The right-side seatback can be flipped forward, in tandem with the front passenger seat, to create a long, flat space that can accommodate items nearly eight feet long. And the bottoms of the rear seats can be flipped up against the backrest to make space for tall items (up to 50 inches high).

Honda has been promoting its “safety for all” initiative, and even the relatively inexpensive Fit comes with antilock brakes and six air bags (including side-protection curtains). Also standard are air-conditioning; power windows, mirrors and locks; and an audio system with a CD player.

The Fit starts at $14,400, including shipping. The Fit Sport test car was fully equipped at $16,520.

Toyota takes a different approach by making most safety features optional, which helps to explain why the Yaris’s base price is much lower. It also means that some people who might not be able to afford a Fit could own a Yaris.

The base price of the Yaris hatchback is $11,530 with a manual transmission (and a quaint throwback, crank windows, which provide a great upper-body workout).

Our Yaris test car was equipped much like the Fit Sport, with the $1,680 power package (power locks, windows, and mirrors, and the multifunction rear seat); the $650 air bag package (side bags and side curtains) and $300 antilock brakes. The sticker price was $15,400.

Since small cars tend to suffer in crashes with bigger vehicles, I would choose all the air bags I could get, especially the air curtains. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has found that in a side impact the curtains cut the risk of death by about 45 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency rated our Yaris at 34 m.p.g. in town and 39 on the highway. The Fit’s rating was 31 in town and 37 on the highway. Figures for manual transmissions are slightly higher.

In our testing, we chose to go with the traffic flow rather than make an effort to coax the best mileage out of the cars. Still, when we calculated our actual mileage, it came pretty close to the E.P.A. estimates: 37.4 for the Yaris and 35.5 m.p.g. for the heavier Fit, in which we also used the manual-shifting paddles to rev the engine up for an occasional bit of hot-rodding.

So after covering 600 miles in each car, which is better over all?

The Yaris felt more polished, was more comfortable on bad pavement and seemed quieter. I also give it points for style.

But the Fit was far more fun to drive and much more functional. For a small car, it can carry a lot of stuff. So if I had the extra $1,000 to $3,000 to spend, I’d take the Fit.

Still, whichever you prefer, the Yaris and Fit represent the American debut of a new type of small car from two big-league automakers. These are economy cars that don’t make you feel as if you’re in economy class.

The question is this: Are Americans, with their bigger-is-better mindset, willing to adjust their attitudes just a little?