The car he is talking about is most likely the Honda Civic FE as in Fuel Economy. It was introduced in 1982 and got 41 mpg in the city and 55 miles per gallon on the highway. So your brother in law is correct. They probably stopped production because the FE had little to no features. Things like A/C, power functions and an automatic trans were not on this model. Later on, the '84-87 CRX got 51 mpg in the city and 67 on the highway! The next CRX also got a similar 56 mpg and that is the one made from '88-91. Keep in mind the fact that all these cars only produced 50 to 75 horsepower so they weren't the quickest cars. It was probably a tough sell to get that extra economy when a normal Civic had the features and still was better on gas than the average car