NOTinuyasha posted:

GM's last great troll before the bailout, and it must be the worst car of the 2000s,

kimbo305 posted:

I assure you there were plenty of worse cars in the 2000s.

NOTinuyasha posted:

The Cobalt's under-engineering was nothing compared to the Aveo. I sat inside one guy's first generation crapbox, GM's last great troll before the bailout, and it must be the worst car of the 2000s, it just can't get worse. Carsurvey/CR both confirm the Cavalier and Cobalt were more reliable, too, somehow. They're still selling the Aveo for the 2011 model year, presumably direct to rental companies.

Autism Sundae posted:

It's a great car if you only measure cars with numbers they get on the track. It's not a great car to buy, own, and drive daily. Nobody's saying that Cobalt SS isn't a great performer.

lazer_chicken posted:

Yeah the pt cruiser would like a word with the aveo. Also, the mercedes ml320. What an unreliable piece of gold-plated poo poo.

EDIT: or anything with the word "sebring" on it. To be honest, I'd take an aveo over practically any chrysler product from the 2000's, unless it has the letters "srt8" on it.

Mighty Horse posted:

While I hate passing judgement on a car based on rental experence, as its usually a pretty poor example of the car, but...

I had an '11 Aveo as a rental last month.

Had 8000K on the clock, and every time we turned the key, it sounded like it didn't want to start, like an old carburated car with a broken choke in sub zero temperatures, I had to fight the urge to pump the gas. Then, while running, sounded like the combustion chambers were filled with ball bearings.

The brakes felt like I was controlling them over a slow internet connection. Press the brake, wait....wait....oh there we go.

The handling felt like there was a piano on the roof, highway off ramps were so bad, it was almost comical.

The headlights were about as effective as me holding my cell phone out the window.

The dashboard seams still had molding flash stuck to them.

And to top it off, it was painted Ferrari Yellow.

An Auto, Non Turbo PT Cruiser with 150K on it would have been an upgrade.

iwentdoodie posted:

That's pretty much my experience with them as well.

I'd also submit the HHR as a horrible loving vehicle of the 2000s. I've never hated a car so loving much, not even the above mentioned Aveo, while driving it.

Cream_Filling posted:

The idea that I have gleaned from interviews and the like is that GM wants to market the Cruze as an "upscale" compact car with a "big car feel" and an interest in "luxury" and economy over sportiness.

Coredump posted:

Are you on the right forum? We have people who daily drive Lotus Elise's on here and we all seem to agree that's pretty awesome.

Actually, if you look at this situation another way. The Cavalier got a reputation that was SO lovely that the Cobalt that came after it is tarnished. GM managed to put together a genuinely good performing car in the Cobalt SS that should tick all the right boxes with AI but...nope.

Franco Caution posted:

The base HHR was not fun at all for me when I had to drive one as a rental.
I did however have a bit of fun with the Turbo HHR SS when I got to take one out for a test drive.

Linedance posted:

there's more to cars than just how fast they go. If there weren't, shows like Top Gear wouldn't be so popular. We all appreciate fast cars, but some people appreciate other less quantifiable things in cars as well like style and perceived quality.

bull3964 posted:

The part about this that is silly is they are going to have a Buick Cruze variant. So, if they push the Chevy version too upmarket, they start stepping on their own toes.

At this point, it sounds like the only way the Buick Cruze will be different is in badging. I'm glad to see that GM is going to go right back to their old habits pre-bankruptcy. Hopefully when they go down the second time we'll let them stay down.

Jack Baruth posted:

And so, some time around 1970, the word went out that, from then on, all GM executives would drive cars from their own brand. I can only imagine that there were a lot of angry faces at the dinner tables of Oakland County when it all went down. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Vice President at the Chevrolet Division of General Motors. As a GM executive, you lead an unbelievably pampered life. It’s been years since you purchased a car from a dealer, or vacuumed out your carpets, or even pumped your own gas. Instead, you have a top-of-the-line Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special or something similar, which is cleaned, serviced, and fueled during the day while you are working. In the evenings, you put on a dinner jacket, festoon your handsome, socially active wife with expensive jewels, and drive your brand-new Cadillac to posh dinner parties; on the weekends, you glide to church with your perfect children, a shining example of the American dream…

…until one day, at the end of work, when your valet arrives with, not your normal Fleetwood, but a f***ing Chevy Impala! An Impala! The “full-sized” car driven by pipefitters, plumbers, Catholics, and recent immigrants! The official car of poor people! And everybody at that night’s dinner party sees you step out of a car universally driven by losers! Remember, folks, this was back in the early Seventies, before foreign cars had conquered the world. It was an era where the Sloan-created GM hierarchy was as natural as breathing – an era when the gas station attendant could guess everything from your annual income to your graduating rank at university simply by reading the script on your front fender. Cadillac to Chevrolet – there could be no more humiliating disaster for one’s prestige! Think of how a Flying Spur owner would feel if he found a Kia Optima in his parking space, and you’re right there with Mr. Chevrolet Executive as his new Impala rolls up. And that’s not the only thing that’s rolling up – the hero of our tale soon finds something out which he may have known intellectually but not fully understood. The windows in a Chevy roll up! By hand! There are no power windows in a basic early-Seventies Chevrolet. A standard Chevrolet does not have a vinyl accent roof, wire wheel hubcaps, leather upholstery, a soft-touch trunk closer, or a “Twilight Sentinel” automatic headlamp system. It’s a basic car designed to compete on price. It’s not a case of Mr. Exec’s car not having all the options – it’s a case of there being no options to have. Chevrolet wasn’t allowed to have equipment that would step on Oldsmobile’s toes.

Not that Mr. Chevy Exec’s neighbor, Mr. Olds Exec, is feeling much better about his situation. Sure, he’s not driving a Chevrolet, but neither is he driving his old Cadillac. He’s still driving a mid-range car despite being an executive, still short on equipment, still woefully lacking in prestige. To put it back in a modern perspective, he’s got a Lexus instead of a Kia – but who wants to replace a Bentley with a Lexus? He’s angry, his wife is angry, and his relatives are whispering that perhaps he’s been “moved aside” at work. The combined angst in the thickly carpeted halls of GM’s executive levels would have been enough to turn everyone emo, if only they had known what “emo” was. Instead, being men of action, the off-brand GM execs swung into just that – action.

If the Buick man couldn’t have a Cadillac – and he couldn’t, at least not now – there was nothing to stop him from building his own Cadillac. Why not build a Buick with a Cadillac’s level of equipment and poshness? And so the Buick Electra 225 – the famed “deuce-and-a-quarter” – became available with a “Park Avenue” trim level. That’s right! Park Avenue! Suck on that, Mr. Cadillac Executive! The Park Avenue had everything a Cadillac had, from a monster chrome grille to – don’t tell anybody – the infamous Twilight Sentinel. Before long, our self-satisfied Buick exec was rolling up to church in style… only to see that his friendly rival from Oldsmobile had arrived in a Ninety-Eight “Regency”, named after the famous hotel on… well, on Park Avenue! The “Regency” was to the Ninety-Eight what the “Park Avenue” was to the Electra. And no sooner does Mr. Buick recover from the shock than the man from Pontiac arrives in the new “Gran Ville”! It’s just as chrome-laden and luxed-up as a “Regency” is! And as the three men stare at each other in the church parking lot – shocked beyond belief that the “other guys” had also managed to create ersatz Cadillacs from their brand’s full-size cars – what do they see coming down the road? It’s a bright-grille, vinyl-roofed Chevrolet “Caprice Classic”! Can you believe it? Even the man from Chevy managed to build himself a Cadillac! The Caprice Classic even had its own badge – which looked kind of like a Cadillac badge redrawn by a fellow high on LSD and limited to one color of paint. And thus the tableau was complete; denied their own Cadillacs, each division had managed to create a Fakeillac to serve in place of the Standard of the World.

Meanwhile, the men from each division’s marketing office were sweating bullets, having received strong orders to make sure the new chrome boats sold in volumes sufficient to justify their existence. For the Buick and Oldsmobile people, it wasn’t too tough; there were plenty of people out there successful enough to buy a Cadillac but afraid of the social implications. For Pontiac and Chevy it was much tougher, and the way it was done helped bring about the eventual collapse of GM’s carefully orchestrated brand hierarchy. The ads for the Caprice hinted – just barely suggested – that the Caprice was pretty much the same as a Cadillac, and people listened. They didn’t buy Caprices – virtually nobody did – but they did understand something: that luxury wasn’t just for rich people any more, and that Cadillacs couldn’t be all that special, if you could get all the Cadillac stuff on a Chevy.

Coredump posted:

Yes I know there is more to cars than how fast they go. You're not looking at the context in which I made my statement. Autism Sundae was discounting the Cobalt SS because he said its a car that only does well when you look at its performance numbers. My point is, we have a lot of people on here who that's all they need. So for all us to cheer on Lotus Elise's being daily driven and then turn and discount the Cobalt SS is not congruent. They both have poo poo interiors. Both fall apart, as is evident with the guy who had a wheel fall off an Elise. In case you didn't catch that, his wheel FELL OFF. IT FELL THE gently caress OFF. Sorry, little blue collar thrown in there.

So basically, I'm just raging that I'm hearing the "there's more to cars than just how fast they go argument" when the Cobalt SS is being discussed but I don't hear that with other fast less well rounded cars.

Coredump posted:

Yes I know there is more to cars than how fast they go. You're not looking at the context in which I made my statement. Autism Sundae was discounting the Cobalt SS because he said its a car that only does well when you look at its performance numbers. My point is, we have a lot of people on here who that's all they need. So for all us to cheer on Lotus Elise's being daily driven and then turn and discount the Cobalt SS is not congruent. They both have poo poo interiors. Both fall apart, as is evident with the guy who had a wheel fall off an Elise. In case you didn't catch that, his wheel FELL OFF. IT FELL THE gently caress OFF. Sorry, little blue collar thrown in there.

Cream_Filling posted:

The idea that I have gleaned from interviews and the like is that GM wants to market the Cruze as an "upscale" compact car with a "big car feel" and an interest in "luxury" and economy over sportiness.

Muffinpox posted:

unicorn foreskin leather

dissss posted:

Sorry that is ludicrous - the only way to market the Cruze is its bigger, cheaper and better equipped than the competition.

This Aveo talk is interesting because the ones that came to the New Zealand market don't seem nearly so bad just painfully average. I wonder if it has more to do with where they're assembled than the car itself.

Cream_Filling posted:

Were the NZ ones made in Korea? What were they badged as? I know in AUS they were Holden Barinas.

I mean the Aveo was bad, but keep in mind that it was developed in Korea in like 2000 and when it was first released there in 2002, Chevy America was still selling the Cavalier and had just stopped selling the Lumina.

As a massive Big 3 apologist, and I want to say nice things about the new Chevy Sonic but I can't because it is ugly as balls and probably poo poo.
And the name sucks, too.

I mean, look at this thing: that is dogshit ugly. In so many different, terrible ways. It looks like you took the front end off a Dodge Charger, smashed it into a pugnose, then stick it on the back of a Corolla (also smashed). I mean the roofline isn't as atrocious as the "sedanified hatch" look of the previous Aveo, but it's still really oddly proportioned. And that front end is just horrifying at any angle.

dissss posted:

Yeah its a Barina but I have no idea where they're assembled.

Also apart from the Chevy front that new one looks pretty good to me, what don't you like about it?

iwentdoodie posted:

Holy poo poo, who the gently caress thought it was a good idea to use a Pug as a design inspiration?

Muffinpox posted:

It's not really a valid comparison, the Elise isn't a comfy car nor is it advertised as such and you have to be a masochist or just not give a gently caress to DD one. The Cobalt SS is a fast four door sedan which it does exceedingly well but it still has a pretty atrocious interior. It's like how AI generally likes the corvette because its fast as poo poo but every time a thread comes up people whine about how it's interior isn't yet unicorn foreskin leather.

Also the wheel didn't fall off, the toe arm anchor bolt snapped. That's bad engineering, not bad materials.

Cream_Filling posted:

Yeah I mean to be fair the rest of the car isn't that bad. In particular, they do a decent job of making the sedan version look like a real sedan, as opposed to the often odd stuff they do to these other subcompacts to mash together hatch body panels into a sedan (see: the Ford Fiesta sedan).

Throatwarbler posted:

Well they're moving production from Korea to the old Cavalier/Cobalt plant at Lordstown, so you won't have to worry about the place of assembly anymore.

Coredump posted:

The comparison was cars whose only redeeming qualities are their driving performance. I think in comparison like that the Elise and Cobalt SS are valid. If one was going to be invalid it would be the Cobalt because you could actually use it as a real car day to day, which would only go further to invalidate the point some people were trying to make.

Linedance posted:

Creme_Filling, as an aside, I don't suppose you could recommend any books on describing automotive design, the language used and how it applies (with pictures and examples?). It's something I'm very interested in but I only have a layman's outlook. You seem pretty well informed. You can PM me if you like.

Cream_Filling posted:

Cream_Filling posted:

I mean, look at this thing: that is dogshit ugly.

Throatwarbler posted:

The Buick version is a rebadged Astra, it is quite a bit more upmarket and they always have the option of dropping in the 2.0T engine for a Gran Sport range topper.

el topo posted:

I don't know about "dogshit ugly", but it does look like an originally-longer car that's hit a wall and has become shorter.