So, I’ve spent about a week and a half so far with my 2011 Cruze ECO. I’m pretty impressed with the build quality so far, but it’s pretty hard to tell about a vehicle that you’ve had for less than two weeks. The ride quality is superb, and road noise is practically non-existent when the windows are up. I’ve noticed that I tend to judge how fast I’m going based on wind and road noise; something I can’t do in this car at all.

The few problems I’ve encountered so far:

The car is far too easy to stall trying to maneuver in a parking lot with the A/C on. Coming from my Cobalt, this car has a serious lack of torque, comparatively. It’s just something I’ll have to get used to.

The Black Granite Metallic is more difficult to keep looking clean than a standard Black paint is. The depth of the metallics add quite a bit of ‘dirty’ look to the paint under a lot of different lighting conditions.

The voice system doesn’t seem to like my voice all that much. I don’t really have much confidence in these systems working properly ever unless it’s something simple to discern like numbers. Voice dialing it does okay with if it’s just numbers, but for some reason, it thinks my sister Pam’s name sounds too much like ‘Help’ to let me put her name in it…

Overall, I’m really happy with the car so far. It’s met my mileage expectations, and I haven’t even been able to get it as low as the 28 mpg city rating it was given. It’s definitely a car to consider if you’re looking for something new that is plenty peppy and won’t destroy your wallet. Switching from my ’02 Sonoma being my daily driver to the Cruze will effectively pay for itself in less fuel costs and additional maintenance, since I tend to drive in excess of 24,000 miles a year and my Sonoma is starting to show it’s age for longer trips.