Malibu best Chevy ever — despite promotional overflow

It has been impossible to avoid the hype. Billboards, television ads, newspaper and magazine spreads – everywhere you look, there are ads promoting the just-introduced Chevrolet Malibu. We’ve seen that before from General Motors, of course, so the question is: Can the new Malibu possibly live up to all the promotional hype?

The answer is: Yes. Or, to equivocate: Almost. It is, in my opinion, the best car Chevrolet has ever built, and that includes everything from the 1957s to the new Corvette.

The new Malibu looks good, drives well, is comfortable, extremely quiet, has high-tech engines, and is reasonably priced. There is no question that it is the strongest competitor Chevrolet has ever offered to compete with the Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Nissan Altima, Mazda6, or Volkswagen Jetta.

For a couple of decades now, GM’s bark has been more impressive than its bite – of performance and market share. It seemed that the more the ads raved, the less substance there was from the vehicle. Not that they were bad, but they couldn’t match up competitively with the tightness, engine technology and maintenance-free best from Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Volkswagen, and others.

A year ago, the Saturn Aura won 2007 Car of the Year for being a breakthrough sedan for General Motors. It is, and it evolved from the German Opel Vectra sedan platform, as does the Pontiac G6, and the Saab 9-3. The Malibu is the fourth car on that same platform, and it takes the direction the Aura and G6 took, and refines it with a different look, much more sound-deadening, and a bit more versatility; where the Aura comes only with the corporate 3.6-liter V6, the Malibu offers that same V6 with 252 horsepower, and also a 2.4-liter Ecotec 4-cylinder, with 169 horsepower.

Tim Kozub, designer of the Malibu, walked us through a preview at a neat hall at the Gibson guitar factory in downtown Memphis. We got a tour of the facility, too, and then walked a couple blocks to Beale Street, where we ate at BB King”s rib joint. Impressive as those were, Kozub’s presentation was the most impressive.

A distinct grille, tightly wrapped upper body, and clean lines all the way define the body, but my favorite touch is the artful way Kozub drew a graceful widening at the bottom of the front and rear roof pillars. Subtle, but beautiful. Underneath, 60 percent of the underbody is made of high-strength steel.

Kozub, who also designed the Aura, said a lot of discussion with Opel and various sketches were done in that process. But with the Malibu, Kozub said he had some pressure to make an immediate design that could make it through management. He did, and it did.

“To see it come out of your hand as a sketch, then to a clay model to full-size car, is quite a thrill,” said Kozub, who, at 34, has worked nine years in GM design. “We had to work to get the battery placement and a lot of things repositioned to get the hood and the fascia past engineering. We used to be handed things by engineering, and we had to work around their demands.”

The base model starts at $19,995, while the LTZ has a base price of $26,995, and the loaded model with the V6 starts at $28,500. A hybrid model is offered at $30,300. All three models drove well. My partner and I zeroed the trip computer throughout our drive in city, rural and freeway segments. With the hybrid (EPA estimates of 24 city and 30 highway miles per gallon) we got 31.5 miles per gallon in mostly urban driving and 29.5 on rural and freeways; with the 4-cylinder (22/30 EPA) we got 25 mpg in combined urban-rural driving with the 6-speed automatic that is coming soon, and 22.0 with the 4-speed automatic on the first production cars; and we were down to 21.2 in a freeway-only run with the V6 (17/26 EPA).

While comfortable, quiet, and good-looking, the Malibu competes with the Accord, Camry, Altima, Mazda6, Jetta and Ford Fusion – all of which offer stick shifts for optimal economy, and all of which can get near or surpass 30 miles per gallon in real-world driving without the hybrid.

I will soon be getting a Malibu of my own for a week, so I’ll be able to give it a more thorough fuel-economy test of my own, to see if it can come closer to its EPA projections.

Couple of preliminary things I noticed. First, no stick shift is available in any Malibu. Too bad, because the 4-cylinder performed well with the 6-speed auto, and would have been even livelier and more fun with a stick. Second, Chevrolet is strongly marketing its outstanding OnStar driver aid system, and boast of a “turn-by-turn” navigation system. But Chevy doesn’t provide a navigation screen in any car, so you have to go through OnStar and let their folks read the big GPS and inform you by voice-only when a turn is coming up. I’m surprised that a nav-system, screen included, isn’t at least offered.

The marketing onslaught, meanwhile, might be unprecedented. On a recent trip, a USA Today was left at my hotel door. Nice touch. I folded it up, stashed it in my computer case, and read it on the flight home. There were five full-page ads for the Malibu in that edition. Three of them ran independently, and the other two were on facing pages, making an almost-lifesize panorama of the new midsize car.
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Good as it is, the Malibu can’t match the hype, because the hype is so over-blown. For example, the car was only displayed at auto shows, and was not actually driveable even at the all-2008 GM drive session in Peoria, Ill., at the end of August. Nobody could drive a Malibu until the media introduction, the last days of October, in Memphis, where Cheryl Catton, the director of marketing, offered some interesting nuggets about the most extensive market research the company had ever conducted.

“Midsize is a choice, not a compromise,” Ms. Catton said. “The buyers have made a choice to not buy a larger or more expensive car. They also rely on the Internet, and don’t trust what the manufacturers say. So we have to reach them to let them know we have a car to challenge the Camry and Accord. We’re not saying it’s the best domestic midsize, but the best midsize.

“We’ve built great products over time, but the perception is not there. We haven’t gotten out there to say how good our cars are.”
She sidestepped the comparison that outmoded engines and transmissions afflicted the style-challenged Chevies of those past generations, and focused instead on a clever television ad campaign that kicked off the Malibu marketing strategy.

The next part, Catton said, is the “reveal,” which started in Mid-November with a flood of large ads that give “third-party endorsements.” On the large screen, we were shown some in which the third-party endorsements were in large, bold words of great praise, attributed to Motor Trend, or Automobile, and maybe other publications. If those objective journalists feel that strongly, it must be a great car, right?

As a cynic, I get annoyed when manufacturers give car magazines early test cars so they can beat regular media by predating a new issue by a month or two. In this case, the first drives of the Malibu were tightly guarded, I wondered about the magazine quotes and their two-month lead time. So I asked Ms. Catton when and how those magazines got Malibus to evaluate.

“Oh, they didn’t,” she said. “Those comments were given to us after they examined the cars on display.”

That seemed to be an unfair slap at the integrity of such esteemed magazines, so I followed up. “Are you saying that none of those comments attributed to those magazines came from anyone who drove the car?” I asked.

“That’s correct,” she said.

That was unfortunate, because the Malibu is more impressive after you drive it, even for those magazine types who “agreed” to submit a misleading comment or two. Look for the ads. You’ll spot them by the big, bold-faced comments attributed to those magazines. Responsibility for the near-fraudulant claims should be shared by Chevy’s marketing whizzes for being too zealous, and the magazine spokesmen who agreed to misleading statements that compromise their integrity.

I was more impressed with the clever ads from the first phase of the launch strategy. One shows a woman jogger turning to cross a residential street in midblock, and running smack into the side of a plain, nondescript Oldsmobile. Another shows hooded bank robbers running out and jumping into a plain car — possibly the same defunct Olds – where they are immediately surrounded by police cars arriving with flashing lights and sirens. The cops all run around the getaway car, apparently without noticing it, to rush into the bank, leaving the Olds and its puzzled robbers, free to drive away.

In both ads, GM is stressing that it’s cars have been so bland in recent years that they were practically invisible to mainstream folks. Very clever.

Marketeers are caught between rhetoric and hyperbole by trying to claim the preceding Malibus were great and lacked only proper perception, while also trying to prove why the new Malibu is such a landmark improvement over that predecessor (which it is). The only way the ad would have more effectively stressed how improved the new Malibu is would be to replace the hard-to-notice Olds with last year’s Malibu.

Maybe consumers still can’t quite trust manufacturers, but they shouldn’t dismiss the Malibu, which has more credibility than all the ad campaigns.

Denver sweep leaves Gophers with first 0-4 start

Denver University needed all of its considerable assets, from great leadership and a focused unity to a bit of comic relief, to claim 5-1, 4-1 victories at Mariucci Arena that were as lopsided as they were rare.

It was the first sweep for the Pioneers at Minnesota in 13 seasons, since Dec. 10-11, 1994, and Denver had only beaten Minnesota once in the previous six games on any rink, coming into last weekend. Also, the Golden Gophers had never started a WCHA race 0-4, which they are after Denver’s vctories vaulted the Pioneers to 3-1 in league play and 6-2 overall.

Goaltender Peter Mannino, one of only three seniors on the club along with captain Andrew Thomas on defense and winger Tom May, has seen the highs and lows,. He guided the Pioneers to an NCAA championship as tournament most valuable player in his freshman season, but then Denver was left out by wrenching near-misses of the last two NCAA tournaments.

Mannino stopped 37 of 38 Minnesota shots in the Friday game, and 32 of 33 in the Sunday matinee rematch, for a 97.2-percent weekend that lowered his goals-against mark to 1.50 for the season, and raised his save percentage to .940. There are fewer statistcis to indicate Mannino’s value as a quiet leader.

On the other end of the spectrum is Tyler Bozak, a freshman who led the British Columbia junior league in scoring last season, but who had only one goal in Denver’s first six games. Bozak broke loose at Mariucci, notching his second goal in the first game, then scoring three goals – call it a “hard-hat trick” — in the 4-1 rematch. His first goal was pivotal, tying the score 1-1 late in the first period, and his second two came in the third period, both shorthanded, and the last one into an empty net. The two shorthanded goals gave Denver a 2-0 edge during 10 futile Minnesota power plays, which ran the Gophers to an 0-for-30 drought covering the last seven games.

Bozak’s first Sunday goal was worthy of a highlight-film, or at least the start of a new television show “The WCHA’s Funniest Videos.”
Trailing 1-0, Bozak was moving to his right at the edge of the slot, wide open. He swung hard at a shot from 15 feet out, and freshman goaltender Alex Kangas dropped to his knees. But the puck didn’t hit him. It was still slithering along on the ice, because Bozak had completely fanned on his shot. Before Kangas could recover, Bozak did, stepping to his right to regain possession and deposit the puck behind the goalie into the open net from a slightly wider angle.

Bozak, a freshman from Regina, Saskatchewan, is more comfortable facing opposing goaltenders than the media that engulfed him after the second-game hat trick. He was wearing the celebratory team hard hat, awarded to the key player. (Mannino wore it after the first game.) After Bozak answered all the questions, somebody jokingly asked if he had been practicing his “fake shot” on his first goal. Pausing just an instant, Bozak spotted an escape route from the embarrassing moment, and he went for it. “Yeah, I’ve used that before,” he said, with a straight face. “When you fake a shot like that, you see where the goalie is going to go.”

The media members dutifully recorded his comments. Later, he was asked if he also takes mulligans when he golfs. Bozak laughed, and he acknowledged that it was probably the first time he had ever scored a goal after completely whiffing on his shot. “Luckily, it worked out for a goal,” he said.

The rest of his hat trick proved all three goals were the kind that seem to be the private domain of pure goal-scorers. The game stood 2-1 when Bozak was out on the penalty kill. A pass came to Minnesota defenseman Cade Fairchild at center-point, and Bozak lunged to poke it past him, scoring on a breakaway, with a deceptive little leg kick before snapping his shot over Kangas’s glove and into the upper right corner.
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Kangas was pulled during a 5-minute major called with 5:09 remaining, and Bozak got the puck on the left boards, almost casually knocking it bouncing like a grounder to shortstop, into the middle of the open net 75 feet away, with 1:53 to go.

“These were huge wins for us, especially coming in here, where they don’t lose much at home,” Bozak said.

Mannino didn’t give up a goal until Denver had five in the first game, but Minnesota gained a 1-0 lead on Blake Wheeler’s goal midway through the first period of the second game. The play started when Mannino went behind the net to clear the puck. He saw Evan Kaufmann coming through the right corner on the forecheck, so he changed his mind and reversed it to the left. Tony Lucia was coming there, however, and quickly passed to Kaufmann, who fed in front for Wheeler’s quick shot. Mannino got back to the crease in time, but was not pleased with the goal.

Mannino allowed nothing more, and the Pioneers took the game over. Bozak’s first goal, then a determined, second-effort rebound goal by Rhett Rakhshani, vaulted the Pioneers ahead 2-1 before the first period ended. Rakhshani also found the weekend to his liking, having scored his first goal of the season along with two assists in the first game, when Tyler Ruegsegger scored two, and Brock Trotter and Bozak one each, and scoring again in the second game.

“Every game is so important,” said Rakhshani. “Especially when you realize what happened to us last year, missing out on the tournament by only one game. We’ve got scoring threats on every line, and our penalty killing has been great. But Mannino is a good part of that penalty kill – if you get it past us, you still have to get it past him.”

Mannino admitted that he “tried to reverse the puck” on the Minnesota goal, but he was reluctant to talk about a later play, when he came out of the net to clear the puck, but fed it to another Gopher for a quick shot. Mannino quickly retreated and come up with a big save.
“He apologized to the team for that pass,” said Gwozdecky. “That’s the kind of leader he is. They didn’t even score on the play. He’s responded to many challenges when the rest of the team has screwed up.”

Coach George Gwozdecky said he appreciated his team getting rewarded for hard work, and in his assessment the Pioneers “won five of the six perods” in the series. He also said he was relieved to have swept the Gophers while they are perhaps pressing too hard to score. “When they start scoring, somebody else can be their victims,” he said.

The Pioneers seem much more focused on the start of their season, and part of it is the way last season ended. “Last year, we were one-hundredth of a percentage point away from qualifying for the NCAA tournament,” Gwozdecky said. “If we had won one more game, we not only would have been in, we’d have been a No. 2 seed in the West Regional.”

This team, from the leadership to the team unity, work ethic, and colorful scorers, appears determined to leave nothing to the chance of hair-splitting NCAA selection computers.

• About the Author

  John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
  
  For those who want to keep up with John Gilbert's view of sports, mainly hockey with a Minnesota slant, click on the following:
  
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• Exhaust Notes:

  PADDLING
  More and more cars are offering steering-wheel paddles to allow drivers manual control over automatic or CVT transmissions. A good idea might be to standardize them. Most allow upshifting by pulling on the right-side paddle and downshifting with the left. But a recent road-test of the new Porsche Panamera, the paddles for the slick PDK direct-sequential gearbox were counter-intuitive -- both the right or left thumb paddles could upshift or downshift, but pushing on either one would upshift, and pulling back on either paddle downshifted. I enjoy using paddles, but I spent the full week trying not to downshift when I wanted to upshift. A little simple standardization would alleviate the problem.
  
  

  SPEAKING OF PADDLES
  The Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution has the best paddle system, and Infiniti has made the best mainstream copy of that system for the new Q50, and other sporty models. And why not? It's simply the best. In both, the paddles are long, slender magnesium strips, affixed to the steering column rather than the steering wheel. Pull on the right paddle and upshift, pull on the left and downshift. The beauty is that while needing to upshift in a tight curve might cause a driver to lose the steering wheel paddle for an instant, but having the paddles long, and fixed, means no matter how hard the steering wheel is cranked, reaching anywhere on the right puts the upshift paddle on your fingertips.
  
  

  TIRES MAKE CONTACT
  Even in snow-country, a few stubborn old-school drivers want to stick with rear-wheel drive, but the vast majority realize the clear superiority of front-wheel drive. Going to all-wheel drive, naturally, is the all-out best. But the majority of drivers facing icy roadways complain about traction for going, stopping and steering with all configurations. They overlook the simple but total influence of having the right tires can make. There are several companies that make good all-season or snow tires, but there are precious few that are exceptional. The Bridgestone Blizzak continues to be the best=known and most popular, but in places like Duluth, MN., where scaling 10-12 blocks of 20-30 degree hills is a daily challenge, my favorite is the Nokian WR. Made without compromising tread compound, the Nokians maintain their flexibility no matter how cold it gets, so they stick, even on icy streets, and can turn a skittish car into a winter-beater.