You'll Never Guess What It's As Smooth As
A middle-school wood-shop teacher once told this author to hand-sand a wooden DVD-rack project until its surface was “smoother than a baby’s bottom.” The teacher’s name is long forgotten, but that quote stuck—the image of the business end of an infant ensured as much—and it applies as aptly to the 2016 Chevrolet Cruze as sandpaper does to wood.
The Cruze is a seriously smooth car, from its slippery shape to the way its doors shut with a muffled wumpf. In large part, the Cruze’s smoothness is derived from its impeccably compliant suspension. In car terms, it is refined. And the Cruze doesn’t come much more so than the mid-grade LT tested here, with the automatic transmission and 16-inch wheels. The available Premier model with the largest wheels available (18-inchers) may be less smooth, while the base Cruze L with its 15-inch tires and their taller sidewalls may be smoother still. Yet cut the lineup down the middle and you’re still talking baby-bottom smooth.
Sanding Off the Edges
Dimensionally, the Cruze’s wheelbase is 0.6-inch longer than its predecessor’s while overall length is up 2.7 inches, placing it at the large end of the compact class. Yet by sanding the edges off the previous Cruze’s upright, three-box sedan shape, Chevrolet lowered the roof by 0.7 inch and reduced nearly every major interior measurement save for rear leg- and knee room. Consider it a sort of packaging coup that the car somehow feels more spacious than before. The steeply raked windshield, which is located farther from the driver at the end of a deeper dashboard, gives front-seat occupants an airier environment, while the increases in back-seat knee room (2.0 inches) and rear legroom (0.7 inch) lend the aft quarters a whiff of limo luxury. Well, there’s plenty of rear-seat space down low—headroom in back remains tight.
The Cruze’s chassis tuning contributes to the sensation of greater size, too, by mimicking the comfortable, solid-feeling mid-size Malibu. General Motors’ excellence in suspension calibration is on full display here, where humble components—front struts and a torsion-beam rear axle—are tuned to deliver uncanny stability and comfort. Sportiness clearly wasn’t a target, but neither the Cruze’s stability nor the driver’s sense of control is compromised even while absorbing ruts and bumps like a larger car. This doesn’t show up in the sedan’s ho-hum 0.82-g skidpad performance or its 168-foot stopping distance from 70 mph, but what matters is that in aggressive emergency maneuvers such as quick lane changes or panic braking while turning, the back end stays planted, and when the car gives up grip, it’s with safe, predictable understeer. In keeping with the car’s general-use mission, the steering is light but direct, with a distinct on-center zone that allows the driver to maintain straight-ahead tracking on interstates using only a thumb on the wheel.
More Power, Less Weight, More Good
Replacing both the previous-generation Cruze’s base 1.8-liter four and available 1.4-liter turbocharged four-cylinder gasoline engines is a single powerplant, an all-new 1.4-liter turbo four. (A diesel variant will return in 2017.) Although similar in displacement to the old turbo engine, this one is 35 cubic centimeters larger, freshly designed, and features a block cast of aluminum instead of iron. It’s 44 pounds lighter than the old 1.4T—it’s also lighter than the old naturally aspirated 1.8-liter four—and backs up to either a six-speed manual or the six-speed automatic transmission fitted to our test car. With 153 horsepower and 177 lb-ft of torque, the new engine bests the old 1.4T by 15 horsepower and 29 lb-ft.
This more powerful engine has less Cruze to lug around. Chevrolet removed mass from nearly every area of the sedan, including 24 pounds from the automatic transmission and 53 pounds from the steel unibody. Our test car feathered the scales at 2944 pounds, 262 pounds lighter than a previous-generation Cruze LTZ we tested in 2010 and 199 pounds lighter than a non-turbo, more sparsely equipped Cruze LS we evaluated in 2011. That’s a big mass reduction, and it helps the 2016 Cruze scoot to 60 mph in 7.6 seconds, 1.3 seconds quicker than the previous 1.4T.
This performance improvement is dramatic on paper, but it doesn’t feel like performance tuning. This engine is set up to operate at a relaxed pace, more diesel-like than fire-breather. Peak torque comes on at just 2000 rpm, and the six-speed automatic transmission chooses the highest gear possible to keep the engine in this zone. Hold down the accelerator, and the engine rumbles toward its 5600-rpm horsepower peak, but you won’t spend much time exploiting the 153 ponies unleashed there because the transmission upshifts between 5500 and 5700 rpm, well short of the 6500-rpm redline. (One look at the engine’s power curve reveals the shift programming is no accident—horsepower drops off precipitously after the 5600-rpm peak, leaving little point in holding onto gears beyond that engine speed.) The shifts themselves are surprisingly quick and, yes, smooth. The programming insists on choosing one gear above what a driver might choose, however, meaning that even when the transmission downshifts, the Cruze can feel flat-footed coming out of corners because it’s still in too high a gear. The upshot is that revs are kept low nearly all of the time, which contributed to our observed fuel economy of 33 mpg, and this reliance on the engine’s low-rpm torque means even small throttle applications accelerate the Cruze without an uncouth downshift. Smooth.
America’s Ride
Having established by now that the Cruze is ideally suited to, ahem, cruising, it’s time to discuss the car’s improved interior. While many small cars suffer from front seats with short cushions that leave occupants’ legs unsupported, the Cruze’s front chairs are big and cosseting, providing a consistent hug from behind one’s knees all the way up to the shoulders. Our Cruze LT came equipped with an optional power driver’s seat that offered adjustments for cushion tilt, seat height, lumbar, and backrest angle, all of which made finding a comfortable driving position easy. The main annoyance is that the brake pedal is positioned about two inches closer to the driver than the gas pedal, requiring more leg motion than should be necessary to apply the brakes.
And the environment works even better than it looks, with the touchscreen running Chevrolet’s easy-to-use MyLink infotainment menu and the hard-button controls operating with a well-damped smoothness. Usefulness abounds: There are storage cubbies in the doors, a stash spot for a phone ahead of the shifter, and a total of six cupholders. The front center armrest slides fore and aft. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay integration is built in, and when an iPhone is hooked up using a USB cable, the driver can call out Siri commands or manage music selections via the touchscreen or a secondary display in the gauge cluster using a steering-wheel control pad. (The same goes for an Android phone, albeit with Google, not Siri, as the personal assistant.) Yes, GM’s 4G LTE data connection and a Wi-Fi hotspot are standard, and, yes, we used both to send some emails while stopped on the side of the road.
Between its accommodating cabin, supple suspension, and strong but muted engine, the Cruze offers a lot to recommend it. Oh, and did we mention the trunk is a huge and usefully shaped hold measuring 14 cubic feet? Were it our dough on the line, we’d still choose a Mazda 3 or a Honda Civic, which are more satisfying to drive. But for buyers who are unconcerned with steering feel or knife-edged chassis response, the Cruze is a darned good car. Source By caranddriver.com
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