Suddenly Cobalt Beats its Competition
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Suddenly Cobalt Beats its Competition
Full story herehttp://www.autosavant.net/2008/04/su...mpetition.html
Among all the excitement over Chevrolet’s new 260 horsepower Cobalt SS, GM made a much quieter, but much more significant change to the Cobalt lineup.
Starting immediately, GM claims the Cobalt with manual transmission to be among the “most fuel-efficient compacts on the market” with 36 miles per gallon highway. This is mostly true, as this new number beats out the Corolla (34mpg for the now current 2009 model) Civic (34 mpg) and Focus (35 mpg) who have been leading until now. However, the Civic with automatic transmission achieves the same highway mileage and better city mileage, and the Civic hybrid (of course) beats out all of them. Nonetheless, the mileage improvement is a meaningful and important improvement to the otherwise well-rounded Cobalt. Using a standard engine that is significantly larger than its competition, the Cobalt has been saddled with a somewhat mediocre 33 mpg until now. Moreover, the new mileage rating was still achieved on the 2.2l EcoTec, which also boasts the best-in-class horsepower (148) and torque (152), leaving the 1.8l and 2.0l engines from the aforementioned competition in the dust. To exemplify the magnitude of GM’s achievement, the very-much acclaimed Mazda3 with a similarly-powerful 2.3l engine achieves miserable 29 miles per gallon on the highway – a full seven mpg difference.
Among all the excitement over Chevrolet’s new 260 horsepower Cobalt SS, GM made a much quieter, but much more significant change to the Cobalt lineup.
Starting immediately, GM claims the Cobalt with manual transmission to be among the “most fuel-efficient compacts on the market” with 36 miles per gallon highway. This is mostly true, as this new number beats out the Corolla (34mpg for the now current 2009 model) Civic (34 mpg) and Focus (35 mpg) who have been leading until now. However, the Civic with automatic transmission achieves the same highway mileage and better city mileage, and the Civic hybrid (of course) beats out all of them. Nonetheless, the mileage improvement is a meaningful and important improvement to the otherwise well-rounded Cobalt. Using a standard engine that is significantly larger than its competition, the Cobalt has been saddled with a somewhat mediocre 33 mpg until now. Moreover, the new mileage rating was still achieved on the 2.2l EcoTec, which also boasts the best-in-class horsepower (148) and torque (152), leaving the 1.8l and 2.0l engines from the aforementioned competition in the dust. To exemplify the magnitude of GM’s achievement, the very-much acclaimed Mazda3 with a similarly-powerful 2.3l engine achieves miserable 29 miles per gallon on the highway – a full seven mpg difference.
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