OH THE HORROR.
I am still recovering from the experience.
This time around, I showed up at Enterprise and was greeted with a Dart. I asked what "Standard" sized cars they had on the lot (rental car size terms are whole separate rant for another day).
They had a Fusion and 2 Malibus. Knowing full well that the previous generation Malibu has a terrible reputation, I asked what year the Malibus were. "They're both 2016s!" the clerk excitedly announced. Sweet! The new Malibu is supposed to be quite nice, I'll take that.
So, he brought the car around, popped the trunk, and moved my stuff over from the Dart he had picked me up in, and I got on the road.
About 20 minutes later, I realized something wasn't right. This car was GARBAGE. What was wrong with all the magazine reviews and everyone else loving this car? It's clearly CRAP. TRASH. Utterly horrid.
Oh.
s***.
That's right.
Dammit GM.
Damn it all to Hell.
I forgot.
GM has this thing they do.
They take the last-generation Malibu and keep producing it under a new name alongside the new model specifically for fleet sales. Especially for rental agencies. Neat.
I had eagerly accepted the keys to a Dan Akerson Special.
I stopped at a gas station to grab a candybar and, sure enough, I had somehow completely glossed over the last-gen styling of the car. I had also failed to notice the "Limited" and "Eco" badges on the trunk.
OH GOOD.
So. Let me tell you all about this monstrosity. This car that was so spectacularly double-plus ungood that it spent the first 20-or-so minutes of my multi-hour drive reassuring me that it wasn't going to do anything even slightly well.
This Car.
Oh geez.
I might have to abandon the normal review format a bit this time. It's just too much structure to contain all this car's nonsensical incompetence.
This car feels wholly, entirely, completely, thoroughly, and inescapably like a parts-bin mashup. But a parts-bin mashup without ANY form of quality control. Nothing matches, nothing fits, everything feels like it came from some other car. The WHOLE ENTIRE CAR feels like it came from some other car.
It looks cheap.
It feels cheap.
It sounds cheap.
It IS cheap.
It's hard plastic and fake padded "upholstery" and pleather and low-quality everything glued onto a Government-Motors era frankenstein of vehicle components.
Let's, I guess, get to the details. Where to start? Let's start where I always do...
Exterior: -5000/10
What the Hell is going on with this car's styling? HAVE YOU SEEN THOSE TAIL LIGHTS? GOOD HELL.
It's proportioned like a shi-tzu that ran into a wall backward.
A lot of cars get the big things right and the details wrong, or the other way around.
The Malibu got nothing right and everything completely terrible.
The nose is 25 feet of the ground.
The rear deck is 55 feet off the ground (and includes that dumbass slanted parcel shelf from the Impala I reviewed a couple weeks ago).
The c-pillars are fat and huge and the waistline raises at them, so you can see exactly NO THINGS that are going on in your quarter view.
The car looks like someone UN-stretched it by removing several inches from the rear doors. The roof line SLAMS back down at the C-pillars, as though GM had to cram the car into a length shorter than originally planned.
THOSE TAIL LIGHTS. WHAT THE f***?
The greenhouse outline at the rear windows has nothing in common with any other line on the roof or pillars--but without achieving anything remotely as nice as the car's predecessor's classy VW Phaeton pillar line.
The car is so tall that the vertical-midpoint trim pieces are ABOVE THE WHEEL ARCHES.
IT'S LIKE NINE STOREYS TALL.
I don't understand why the person who designed those tail lights was allowed to continue breathing.
THIS CAR IS A STYLING DISASTER. It's not actually ugly. It's just a MESS. It's incoherent and just lazy. None of it fits and all of it is bad.
Interior: -∞/10
Whoa.
Someone. DESIGNED THIS. And then someone else APPROVED IT. And then GM ACTUALLY PRODUCED AND SOLD IT.
The arm rests are hilarious. The center one is positioned for the driver seat at its rearmost position. The forward one is positioned for the driver seat at its forwardmost position. There are about 3 inches of overlap between the front of the center armrest and the back of the door armrest. YOU CAN'T USE THEM BOTH AT ONCE. And there's this bizarre ~5-inch gap between the seat and the door panel, so the door armrest isn't really usable anyway, unless you're huge. As a left-handed steerer (I'm used to shifting with my right, and resting that hand on the shifter generally) I have never been less comfortable in a car. There was NOWHERE to rest my left arm. The arm rest was too far forward, too far left, and too low. I have REALLY long arms. I could SORT OF stretch awkwardly to rest the tip of my elbow on the arm rest with my hand in an awkward spot on the steering wheel. So I adapted to right-handed steering, but even THAT didn't work right. The window switches on the door are exactly where my hand rested (and about midway along the length of the armrest, to illustrate just how nonsensically it's mounted relative to the seat). Several times, I noticed wind noise and realized the rear windows were cracked. I was baffled the first half-dozen times, then I noticed that my resting hand was occasionally pressing the rear window switches slightly. I was accidentally cracking the windows because GM can't be bothered to sit someone in a mockup for half a second before passing it on to production.
The gauge cluster is exactly mounted so that no part of it can be visible at any time, regardless of seat or steering wheel positioning or driver height. You can't see ANYTHING. Except the center LCD between the gauges. Which mercifully can be set to show vehicle speed, or I'd have had no idea how fast I was going.
This car is a black hole. You sit way, way, way, way, way down in a tub. Even with the seat fully raised (more on that in a minute) it feels like a pit. With the seat lowered, as I prefer, it felt like driving a damn tank through a periscope. Especially because of that MORONIC angled rear parcel shelf that slopes endlessly upward toward the unnecessarily high rear deck.
Back to the seat height: when I first got in the car, I thought it didn't even have that function. EVERY adjustment in the car is manual. ALL OF THEM. Except, as I discovered later, when hunting for the trunk release button (which I NEVER found) for the seat height. That's electric. And it's done via a recessed switch on the side of the seat that's not visible unless you're not in the car. I fumbled around for a lever for several minutes after getting into the car before assuming it was just not there. Such bad design.
The headrests are INSANELY far forward. And, whether due to my seat adjustment or whatever else, anytime there were road oscillations, I would get repeatedly slapped in the back of the head by the rubbery, bouncy headrest. It was supremely obnoxious. Eventually, I lowered the thing (it moves rearward as it lowers, for some reason) and that stopped the "why are you hitting yourself," but then it was too low to actually REST my HEAD on, which last I checked is sort of its entire purpose.
There is no rear legroom.
NONE.
Because, again, apparently GM designed this entire car, and then decided it needed to be 8 inches shorter, so they chopped it out between the rows of seats.
The footwell is something like 7mm wide. Somehow, they crammed a brake pedal, a gas pedal, and a dead pedal down there.
It really feels like this car was built from remnants of interior components from at least 4 other cars.
The driver window had one-touch lower but no one-touch raise. The rest had no one-touch anything (except one-touch accidentally vent slightly because the switches are in a stupid place).
Like all recent GM products, this one had a uselessly-small cubby behind the center LCD screen. This one was even MORE uselessly small, and was triggered by an ugly and enormous slider lever.
The infotainment system is so bad it gets its own category. I've never had to do that before.
Oh, and the controls were SO STRANGE. The steering wheel controls were a combination of permanent rocker switches (i.e. up for on stays up, if you brush your hand across it it'll rock back and turn off), regular springy rocker switches, and roller switches.
Those roller switches...MAN, sombody at procurement must have gotten a bulk deal. Instead of just using buttons or switches, this car occasionally uses what LOOK like analog vertical rollers. Like a traditional interior light dimmer switch. In fact: including the interior light dimmer switch. Except instead of actually being rollers, they are simply spring-loaded rockers. You roll slightly up or slightly down, and either hold for continued change (i.e. turning the brightness up more than one notch) or let go. Why? Why these? Why not a normal analog potentiometer for the dimmer? Why is cruise set/resume on a goofy roller thing and not buttons like other things? Why is next track/previous track on a roller and not a regular rocker button like the volume controls next to it. And, come down to that, why is it skip tracks that's on the roller and volume on the rocker if we're going to have one of each? It seems SO incredibly random and weird. I fail to see the benefit of these switches over something more normal.
OH. YES. One of the best parts: The rearview mirror was concave, and made everything in the rear view look tall and narrow like a funhouse mirror. SO NEAT. NOT REMOTELY DISTRACTING. WHAT THE HELL WAS GM DOING WHEN THEY DESIGNED THIS CAR!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!
The one thing they did right? There are weird little rubberized slots in the center console to set a phone vertically in. They are EXACTLY the size of a Nexus 6 with a slim case. I COULD ACTUALLY PUT MY PHONE SOMEWHERE IN A CAR. That's never happened to me before...
Last thought: Does ANYONE know what the weird small blue light you find in the overhead console on EVERY SINGLE ONSTAR-EQUIPPED GM does? What the Hell is its purpose. It's not bright enough to illuminate anything, it's tiny, it's blue, it doesn't aim at anything in particular, and if I didn't see it in every GM car of recent build, I'd thing it was just a missing plastic filler plug letting backlighting through.
THIS Light, in the middle of this picture (not the ones indicated by arrows, the one between them).
Infotainment system: -10,000,000/10
It crashed on me.
Multiple times.
IT ACTUALLY CRASHED ON ME.
It's not even a Microsoft-equipped Ford, for crying out loud.
It actually crashed.
On 3 occasions.
And had to reboot itself.
The best crash was the first one.
I was happily cruising along in farmland Idaho, between exits with nowhere to stop.
I was listening to Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good" from the phenomenal Joe Walsh album "But Seriously, Folks..." when the song started skipping.
Let's get this straight.
This is not a 1979 Eldorado.
It did not have a vinyl record player.
It was not a CD, either.
It was a bluetooth link to my phone, streaming Joe Walsh.
And it started skipping.
So, my first reaction was to reach for the "next track" button.
It didn't do anything.
Then I noticed that the screen had this REALLY NEAT RGB ghosting going on around everything. Nothing was responding. Not the touchscreen. Not the physical buttons. And the music was still skipping. I pressed the power button. I HELD the power button. Nothing. I mentioned before that there was nowhere to stop. My head was starting to hurt from the half-second clip of Life's Been Good that had been playing.
I decided I'd try a couple more things, and then if nothing happened I'd pull onto the shoulder and restart the car.
Just as I was about to signal right, the screen went black, the music stopped, and then a few seconds later the boot logo for MyLink appeared. HALLELUJA!
The next time it froze was mercifully skip-free, but it did randomly reboot itself mid-song. And then later, after I ended a speakerphone call, it tried to switch back to bluetooth music, apparently got REALLY confused, and rebooted itself yet again.
The audio system was horrid. It sounded like it was playing from a speaker inside a pringles can that was stuffed with cotton and then left at the bottom of a concrete stairwell and with the EQ set to dubstep mode.
There was no bass, no treble, and no mids. There was just sort of an approximation of the music I was playing. Tweaking the EQ only made it sound bad in new and interesting ways, but nothing fixed the problem.
Voice quality over bluetooth on phonecalls was comically bad. At least people seemed to hear ME just fine. One person heard the "bing" sound when the car alerted me to a text message, which is funny because I could barely hear it myself.
Oh, and speaking of the car alerting me to text messages. It does that. With a window that takes over the whole center screen, and has five options. Listen, view, reply, dismiss, and something else I don't remember. If you press them it tells you "This action is not available while the vehicle is in motion." Which makes me wonder...WHY EXACTLY IN THE SMEGGING HELL IS IT BOTHERING TO OVERRIDE EVERYTHING ELSE TO TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH ANY WAY?! It's not rhetoric. It's not hyperbole. Sincerely, genuinely, I want to know: What the HELL was going on at GM when they designed this pile of smoldering s***?
Powertrain: 7/10
This is, perhaps sensibly, the least abhorrent aspect of this car. It was...okay. For a 4-banger strapped to a 6speed auto in a midsize sedan, it handled itself okay. It wasn't short on usable torque and it didn't need to downshift a lot--but it actually did try to spend a lot of time in 6th gear. A good combo. It did have to be wound out for things like merging, and it seemed hesitant to rev past 4500rpm, where it started feeling more than a little wheezy and overworked. But I could pass people when needed, accelerate in traffic acceptably, didn't spend my city driving time shifting endlessly between 57 gears, and it got fairly acceptable fuel economy at 35 combined.
It had an auto start/stop system. I noticed it immediately. The 2.5 liter Ecotec isn't horrendously unrefined while in motion, but startup and shutdown are like being in a brass tumbler. You come to a stop, foot on the brake, and the whole car shudders. The tach needled drops below 0 RPM to "Auto Stop." If you lift your foot off the brake or apply your other foot to the gas, the engine starts quite quickly and you're off (I don't normally brake with my left foot because I'm not a rally driver or from Montana, but I wanted to experiment with the start/stop system's behavior). I say I noticed it immediately, but not for the reason I would have expected. Engine starts were actually quite prompt and didn't REALLY delay getting off the line in normal driving (It would sure kill ETs at the strip, of course). But that shuddering stop and start were so intrusive, even if it had started with absolutely NO delay, I'd still have noticed.
The trans kept revs pretty low, but I was a little disappointed when cruising at 35mph at just over 1k upon finding that the car was stubbornly staying in 5th and wouldn't even manually shift into 6th for even lower revs. (I got the same infuriating "Shift Denied!" [yes, the exclamation point is GM's doing, not mine] that you get in all GM manumatic vehicles when trying to do basically anything except leave the car in full Auto mode.)
Handling 6/10
Actually, despite by earlier rant, this wasn't abysmal either. The car went where I felt like I was pointing it, steering wasn't over- or under-assisted or too fast or slow nor too heavy or too light. I took a couple aggressive right turns at intersections and it didn't flounce around or roll excessively. It basically did what was expected of it. I was never ever tempted to try to have any fun with it, but it didn't get in my way a-la Nissan Altima.
Overall: -12,000,000,000 out of 10
This car is an indefensible disaster. Nobody will ever get in this car and think "Yeah...I dig this, it makes sense and is well designed and I want to spend my money on it." Which is why it sold like s***. But I'd like to share a quote to end on a humorous note:
"I think it's a good car. It'll do OK." -Dan Akerson [I sincerely did not invent this quote, it's real. Google it and weep.]
