Feb 4 2012
Today’s commercial, entitled “2012,” stars the Chevrolet Silverado in a post-apocalyptic world. In this ad, Chevy reminds us of its oft-repeated statistic that its trucks are the longest lasting, most dependable trucks on the road, and it does so by imagining that the Mayans were right and that 2012 is our last year on Earth.
Jan 22 2012
Super Bowl commercials are big business, with multimillion-dollar 30-second spots and productions that seem to get more costly and elaborate every year. General Motors bucked that trend by giving independent film makers the opportunity to make their own 60-second spot, with the winner having their ad played in front of an estimated 110 million viewers during The Big Game.
Jan 6 2012
Hundreds of thousands of Aveos have been dumped here over the years, often into rental car fleets where they would have even greater opportunity to reflect poorly on GM. The company sold some 48,000 Aveos in 2010, over 28,000 in 2011, and stragglers on dealer lots continue to find new homes even as you read this. So it’s no wonder the “new” GM doesn’t want us talking about the Sonic as its replacement. But that it is. And thankfully, it’s a good one. We’d even be willing to call it great if GM would work on a few of the details.
That’s not entirely a criticism, as in this class of cars some style is needed, if for no other reason than to distract you from some of the corners that get cut in the interest of affordability. Indeed, the Sonic has a few interior shortcomings, most notably the coarse headliner, which seems less like a finished product than the substrate for one. While the dash is a broad expanse of grey plastics, just as you’d expect, that didn’t bother us at all. The “leatherette” seating did, as it’s got a rubbery taxicab texture that should either be upgraded to real hide, or just be banished altogether. The cloth seats we’ve enjoyed in other Chevys are much preferred.
Speaking of which, under the hood of our Sonic was the same 1.8-liter, four-cylinder that serves as the budget engine option in the Cruze, making the same 138 horsepower and 125 lb-ft of torque as in its bigger brother. The 1.8-liter Ecotec provides ample motivation, but we’d be lying if we didn’t say we were disappointed our Sonic was not equipped with the available 1.4-liter turbo, also shared with the Cruze. Doubling down on that disappointment was the transmission, as our Sonic was saddled with a six-speed automatic. Sonics with the 1.8-liter can be had with a five-speed manual transmission, while the tranny in the 1.4-liter has an extra gear. The automatic will probably serve the interests of the commuter crowd well enough, but we found it annoying – and not just because we would have preferred to do the shifting ourselves. The automatic transmission in our Sonic shifted rather slowly and wasn’t particularly smooth either. Even the Sonic auto-box’s manual shift mode is GM’s standard button-on-the-shifter design that requires moving the shifter to the manual detent before using the shift buttons, and the whole thing is too much of a pain to bother with.
We would be more willing to issue a pass on the automatic transmission if we felt like it were set up for maximum fuel economy, but here is where insult piled atop injury. We only saw 29 miles per gallon overall during our week in the Sonic, in which we traveled some 600 miles, the majority on the highway. Yet this wasn’t unusually low, as it’s right in line with the EPA combined estimate of 28. It’s the 1.4-liter Sonic manual that posts the impressive fuel economy numbers, hitting 40 mpg on the highway and still returning 29 in town. Our 1.8-liter Sonic’s official numbers are just 25 city and 35 highway, which just doesn’t seem good enough when the plain-Jane Ford Fiesta automatic is rated at 29/39 and the three-year-old Honda Fit even gets an EPA combined rating of 31.
Source: AutoBlog
