Rental: Chevrolet Cobalt Coupe at 31K

At 31 000 miles, the Chevy Cobalt makes quite a rental. I got to, er, enjoy one while on a recent trip to Sedalia, MO, where I was making wheels at the local wheel plant. I put about 250 miles on the dark teal blob, and discovered a whole host of reasons why I have pet peeves. I also believe that the American trend of designing everything for 6'5" males is screwing the US automakers in ways they can't even begin to imagine. Oh, and forget Emerald Isle at National if you want a compact. That perk only applies to midsize and up. Discrimination!

This oldish Cobalt was holding up rather well on the mechanical end. Brakes were solid enough, transmission was smooth, and the engine never wimpered. I was actually a bit above my usual comfort level with GM products - the smallish Cobalt was well-suited for the highway cruise I took it on from Kansas City to the Ragtime Capital and back. The interior was not as bad as I expected, with minimal fit and finish issues. Most notable was the pulling away of the soft lining on the door card from around the handle cup. This was occurring on both doors, so it's not possible to blame it on crappy treatment as a rental ho. This was a miscut of the trim material. The majority of the soft surfaces were wearing well. Overall, not too bad for a cheap entry-level coupe with a mildly stylish exterior and a pleasant, non-challenging interior.

Let's focus on the interior. One thing I have not paid much attention to in the past is chrome rings on the instrument cluster. I find them annoying in daylight for sure, but at night, they are downright distracting. Any stray ambient light is reflected, and I spent a lot of time looking down to find out that the moon was the source of the movement on the tachometer, not my accelerator input. Add chrome gauge rings to my peeve list. The centerlines of the cluster, the steering column, and the seat were different and not aligned - the one thing that above all drives me nuts. The climate and audio controls were clearly laid out, not complex, and perfectly suited for the teenage girls that make up the target market for this product.

The seats were ok, as long as you didn't try to adjust them. Getting your hand between the seat and door card was a feat even for me and my girlie hands. There wasn't any room there! I found myself pulling over several times to open the door so I could adjust the seat properly. This was less of a problem on the four-door Cobalt I rented earlier this year in Chicago. As usually, I found the pitch of the lower cushion to be oppressively forward, but I have come to grips with the fact that very few other people besides myself like to drive like Emmo in his Indy car.

Another sore spot (my neck, actually) was the headrest, or lack of one. The moulded-in headrest on the seat was about six inches above where it would have been useful for me. I mentioned above the large-scale design that plagues American cars - this is an example of it. Other examples included a parking brake lever that was positioned in a way that made it useless for anyone with an inseam of less than 34 inches. The shifter was moved back to accommodate Big-Gulp-sized cupholders, and this was also farther back that I found comfortable or useful. What really got me was the turn signal stalk. My fingers are long for a girl, I span over an octave on the piano. This means I rarely have to stretch to reach for switchgear. I had to stretch in the Cobalt. Not just stretch, but release my grip on the steering wheel. That is unsafe, and GM knows it.

The head of the Mustang product team at Ford was fired for not making the back seat of the Mustang comfortable for a 6'5" man. A huge mistake, the firing, that is. The target market for Mustangs is not families of basketball players. And the target market for the Cobalt is not giant men, either. It's young people, mostly ladies, who need a car that fits them physically as they grow into driving. Instead of worrying about the big guys, the General should focus the Cobalt design team on the small girls. The IP of the Cobalt is perfect for young drivers - it's minimally distracting (chrome rings aside), and delivers the right information. Focusing the interior layout on people from 5'0" to 5'6" would move the Cobalt into more hands the same way well-fitting clothes find their ways onto more bodies.

The Big Three need to give up their 99th percentile rule and focus on the lower 50%. You can't design a good small car around a 300 pound guy, but a 130 pound girl is a great place to start.

Tailgate Gate

Toyota's taken a few hits in the quality department, and they seem to keep coming. Way back when I first put my hands on the Toyota Tundra early last year, I complained to anyone who would listen that the tailgate was flimsy. It felt like the frame stamping was missing, leaving just the inner and outer skins hemmed together. It didn't 'thunk' when I closed it. It was downright wimpy.

The folks over on Tundra Solutions have been cataloguing some sheet metal failures of these tailgates, and it does indeed appear that there is a problem with the sheet metal. While hemflanges are rarely welded, they are always sealed. The white goo in many of the pics is that sealer. I'm troubled that the sealer does not run the perimeter of the flange - pretty much guaranteeing that once the seam deflects, water will penetrate. TBH, there's just not enough metal in that flange to hold anyway. Who was manning that Autoform desk?

We have taken Toyota "quality" for granted for a long time. What we got used to is not "quality" per se, but downright overbuilding. This tailgate issue is overengineering - building at the lowest limit of build quality to make the part at some prescribed duty cycle. Each time we hear of a Toyota failure, it's come down to the same thing - overengineering and sacrificed build quality.

How can you blame them? There's money in every bit of metal you don't put into your product. There's money in every redesign you don't do, every test you don't do. And apparently, there's a crapload of money in marketing the gimmickry that passes for the new version of luxury.

Thanks, I'll take good ol' overbuilding over this overengineering stuff.

Mercedes Benz hybrid power?

The above crappy cell phone pic depicts an R-Class with a man plate and a yellow sticker reading "HYBRID POWERED". It was spotted northbound on Stephenson last tuesday.

What are those Germans up to?