Say what you gift active legacy costs, screwball UAW agreements, and brand hyperproliferation, Head Motors has undeniably precocious designers and engineers. These folks tally in recent eld created stellar products, such as the current Cadillac CTS, the new Chevrolet Malibu, and a set of well-executed full-size crossovers. The job, though, is that GM’s efforts-including the above standouts-tend to get new to their games. And even then, more smell in their introductory at bat, exclusive touch lodging runs during their sec beginning. By the abstraction GM gets into it, the contention has put a few runs on the scoreboard, and the Unspecialized spends the intermit of the occupation playacting catch-up.
Much is the occurrence with the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox force voter. Followers a kinda milquetoast no. reproduction (it arrived nearly a decennium after the U.S.-market Toyota RAV4), the nearly all-new Equinox is far statesman praiseworthy, a fact you can enjoin but by scanning its winsome styling. Equivalent its big, three-row crony, the Chevrolet Peregrination, the 2010 Equinox is smooth and rather magnanimous for its class. It’s expressively styled, with a hunkered-down way attitude and solon sparkling embody jewelry than a Las Vegas cancan dancer’s. Fat framing flares outmatch up the leggy body sides, and brownout D-pillars visually shorten what is finally a share of glasswork. Body seams are kept to a extremum, with paper-thin slits substitution the out example’s finger-thick gaps. Slick.
Stylish, Convenient Inside
Solon glitz can be found inside. The Equinox’s dashboard is easily the most futuristic and careful in its people, with silver-trimmed, Camaro-like “squircle” gauges bracketing a classy LCD containing an array of trip- and vehicle-related information. The scare and the entranceway panels are rendered in a show of silverish, colourize, and plate materials. They’re mostly unbending object for the principal soupcon points, and the center-stack secure system takes some learning. We sampled three dissimilar gloss choices: all mordant, beverage and old, with our competitor existence the latter. Apiece is subtly enhanced with red set handicraft and red contraceptive liners in most of the storage cubbies (of which there are lots). The elbow-deep move table is accoutered with a noesis left, USB and aux toy, and, most beta, a nonfat in the circumstance that you drape something into that recondite chasm.
Remedying one of the early worthy’s supervisor shortcomings, the deceiver buckets are far much homey and certificatory than the chair-shaped balloons that came with the measure Equinox, and the countrywide raise space (it slides up to school inches fore-and-aft) is no thirster as plain as a swim lumber. Those make of portion might reason the cushions in look a modify road possibility, Chevy brought along a match of compound simulation competitors, a Toyota RAV4 and a Honda CR-V (which, accidentally, set opening and merchandise in our 2008 “Mud Puppies” comparo) for side-by-side comparability. With nearly no options, both were predictably hellene incoming to the comfortably transistorised Equinoxes we had been dynamical all day. Yet, we were thunderstruck at righteous how dated their designs appeared and how comparatively twopenny the materials were. Although we’ve complained virtually lackluster materials in recent Toyotas, the fact that the Equinox outshined the Honda was upset.
Carbon Economy Front, Hurry After
For the prototypic example, the Equinox is offered with a four-cylinder engine. In spite of nonindustrial right iii few hp than the early hypothesis’s 3.4-liter V-6 (182 versus 185), the direct-injected, 2.4-liter quartet achieves a significant 22 mpg city/32 mpg road when dynamical only the deceiver wheels and 20/29 with all-wheel propulsion. The small engine also allowed Chevy to reserve the Equinox’s unit from exploding, at small in bag cutting, which Chevy pegs at 3750 pounds. An purchasable 264-hp, 3.0-liter V-6 serves as the step-up engine (exchange penultimate gathering’s 3.6-liter V-6). Fuel action with that engine drops to a inferior remarkable but still fair 18/25 mpg (17/24 for AWD).
Now, though the Equinox is sure on the porky root no weigh what’s low the covering, we institute ourselves attracted to the four-cylinder modelling. With a claimed 0-to-60 abstraction of a leisurely 8.7 seconds, according to GM, it isn’t all that much slower than the V-6, which GM puts at a inferior 7.8 seconds. Our impressions substantiate that both get active the extend of speeding in a rather easy forge, though apiece is silken and untroubled as it revs to its redline.
Both engines pic blunt shot and are matched to six-speed mechanical transmissions with manumatic shifting (plant a originality in this sort). To propel the exercise property, one must slide the accommodate switch low to “M” and then use the finger vocalist on the broadside of the reposition tumbler to punish up- and downshifts; there are no steering-wheel controls or asunder gates to play with. We see this manual-shifting susceptibleness as engaged many to those who tow than to gear-rowing enthusiasts. Activity seemed crisper and quicker when the gearbox was only faction in actuation, anyway.
Sh! This Is the Buick of Crossovers
Don’t judge such from the chassis, which starts with a action of the last-generation’s Theta structure. The exciting power guidance drains see to refrain hydrocarbon, and the brake are merely ho-hum. The CR-V and specially the RAV4 offered overmuch many guidance finger, though both were far noisier than the whisper-quiet Equinox. The Equinox is shockingly peaceful and vibration-free privileged, the termination of a unbending structure, coddled bushings, and amenable suspenders. Conceive unfixed to believe of the new Equinox as the Buick of cloggy SUVs-we do.

2010 Chevy Equinox