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Cobalt restores faith in American autos
It had been 20 years since I bought a car for myself. Six days ago, that long drought ended. I bought a brand-new Chevrolet Cobalt. I really like the car and the price I paid for it. (More on that in a moment.)
I’ve always driven small, fuel-efficient cars — accordingly, the Cobalt is a compact with a solid highway mileage rating of 31 mpg. But in buying it, I did something that was a sharp reversal of form: I bought a small car built in America by a U.S.-based automaker.
The last time I did that was in the very early 1980s, when I was a young, financially struggling reporter with a wife staying at home with our two preschool daughters. I paid $1,000 cash for a used 1975 Chevrolet Vega, an ugly little Army-green station wagon that should be in the General Motors Hall of Shame.
The Vega had beaucoup problems, including a regularly malfunctioning manual transmission that periodically required me to crawl under the car to unstick the gears. I once did this in a new business suit, drawing guffaws from passing motorists. Yeah, real funny.
Fifteen months ago, I exorcised those demons by writing about the Vega in a column that included this comment: “Ideally, I’d like for my next car to be made in America by an American automaker.”
I want to see the beleaguered, much-maligned U.S. auto industry survive and thrive. It’s important to keep decent-paying manufacturing jobs and industrial know-how in America rather than shipping it all overseas.
Sometimes it seems as if we’re becoming a bipolar economy of wildly overcompensated CEOs and hedge fund managers at one end and undercompensated, uninsured working-class people on the other, with a shrinking middle class treading water in between.
My nightmarish experience with the Vega soon would steer my wife, Nina, and me toward Toyota, which long has built reliable, fuel-efficient small cars such as the Corolla. Nina drives a 2000 Toyota Rav 4, a small SUV. Having purchased the Cobalt, I sold my 16-year-old Toyota Tercel (still running well, with only 118,900 miles on it) to a family wanting a small car that gets good mileage in a period of $3.60-a-gallon gasoline.
The fact that I overcame my checkered Vega past and bought a Chevy Cobalt speaks volumes: It says that U.S. car makers are producing attractive, better-built small cars with good mileage ratings and pleasing price tags.
In purchasing the Cobalt, I finally was able to fulfill my wish of buying an American small car without feeling I was being played for a sucker. The vehicle is built at General Motors’ plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Ample power
There’s lots to like about my Cobalt. With a 2.2-liter engine, it has ample power to complement its good mileage rating. It drives quietly both in town and on the highway (in contrast to one rating declaring it “noisy”).
The four-door, automatic-transmission sedan I bought is modest-size but not tiny, with comfortable seating for four average-size people. It has a good radio and CD player. It’s got side air bags. The trunk is surprisingly large. I like the car’s styling and the pretty, dark-blue color of the one I bought.
The price tag was not only pleasing but surprising. Reduced by ample rebates and discounts, I purchased it for $12,238 — a figure low enough to allow me to pay cash and avoid a car payment. That price included tax, title and license, and I had no trade-in. The car has a good warranty and free roadside assistance package.
Considering all factors, I believe I probably got more bang for the buck with this car than I would have with some of the Cobalt’s strong small-car competitors built by foreign-based carmakers. That’s something I once thought I’d probably never say.
X Jack Z. Smith is an editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.