What is the chevy cruze comparable to

From the July 2016 issue of Car and Driver.

There’s a popular myth that, outside of sports cars and exotics, all modern cars are essentially the same. Believers claim that quality, safety, and equipment levels have reached a plateau that makes the differences between a Honda and a Hyundai somewhat moot. It’s a simplified view of the world, kind of like those early grade-school report cards where you were satisfactory at best or needed improvement at worst, but either way, everyone was moving on to the next grade.

In recent years, the automotive compact class has advanced into a fleet of mini mid-sizers. Almost universally, these cars have grown in interior dimensions, inherited upscale features, and adopted prices that top out north of $30,000. But we don’t buy into the notion that similarity means homogeneity. There’s a distinction between satisfactory and great, just as there’s a difference between the first grader who understands subatomic particles and the mouth breather who can’t stop eating all the delicious, free paste. A car can go 100,000 miles without fault and spot a vehicle in its blind spot and still have deficiencies in the most elementary aspects of steering, braking, and accelerating. To sort out which small cars are at the head of the class and which need to be held back, we gathered five of the newest small entries, all ­sensibly equipped and priced right in the middle of the range.

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Marc UrbanoCar and Driver

When deputy editor Daniel Pund described the Nissan Sentra as neither admirable nor entertainingly bad, he phrased it as if either characteristic would make this car more likable. Nissan’s rolling box of bland mediocrity is only defined by compounding deficiencies. It is the heaviest and least powerful car here, the tallest and narrowest, the most expensive and least satisfying.

HIGHS: Faster than walking, shelters you from the elements.
LOWS: Crude handling, uncomfortable seats, underpowered engine.
THE VERDICT: The most basic transportation.

Aggravated by a continuously variable transmission, this 130-hp moaner only breaks through 60 mph after 9.5 seconds of thumb twiddling, more than a second behind the next-slowest competitor. Accelerating in traffic, the revs rise and fall and rise and fall again, but unlike the Honda Civic’s CVT, which does a passable imitation of a conventional automatic at full throttle, the Sentra’s sluggish, yo-yoing behavior suggests that it’s actually just hunting for the right ratio.

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Hustled down a back road, the Sentra is a roller coaster erected in a dollar-store parking lot by traveling carnies. The front and rear ends of the car seem to roll out of sync, jostling and unsettling the driver around corners. Applying moderate braking with even the slightest steering input sets your heart racing as the rear of the body heaves sideways atop the suspension.

Even for unashamed buyers of basic A-to-B transportation, the ­Sentra is a sorry choice. The car weaves in the faintest crosswinds and wobbles side to side in the wake of semis. It tromps over expansion joints with crude chopping motions that can make the Hyundai feel like a Mercedes-Benz S-class. The driver’s seat is a personal penalty box with a short seat bottom, a protruding lump in the seatback, and slick leather over hard cushioning. The highest price in the test does buy the longest list of equipment, but it’s hidden in a cheap, ­featureless design, including a navigation system that is as small and pixelated as a 10-year-old TomTom.

Nissan knows how to build great small cars. We’ve seen it do so before. In the 1990s, its astonishing Sentra SE-R drew comparisons to The Sacred One, the BMW 2002. Today, the company appears to be taking full advantage of a world where everyone receives a passing grade by only making the minimum effort.

Fourth Place: Hyundai Elantra

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But while the forward progress in design persists, Hyundai’s incremental improvements in chassis dynamics appear to have stalled with this generation. Steering remains Hyundai’s greatest challenge, with the Elantra’s wheel requiring a light touch on highway slogs to compensate for the on-center dead spot. The first few ambiguous degrees of steering require either a ­perfectly steady hand or implementing ­frequent corrections to keep the car tracking straight on the interstate.

Atkinson-cycle engines like this one use a valve-timing strategy that boosts efficiency while sacrificing torque, but the Elantra doesn’t feel any weaker than the others. It clears 60 mph in 8.3 seconds, tied with the Honda, but has the added virtue of a proper six-speed automatic that shuffles gears competently and invisibly in the background. While it’s comfortable for short stints, the Elantra can grow tiresome as the miles accumulate. Even if the sound meter doesn’t show it, the wind and road noise penetrate deeper into your skull in the Elantra, the Nexen tires emitting a high-pitched zipping sound on concrete surfaces. Hyundai continues to show steady progress in many aspects of vehicle development, but there are several disciplines where this Elantra could still use a little more improvement.

Third Place: Chevrolet Cruze

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Marc UrbanoCar and Driver

Remember the Cavalier and the Cobalt? Chevrolet wishes you didn’t (except maybe the Cobalt SS). Chevy struggled for decades to grasp the compact-car curriculum before finding success with its alternative approach. True to its name, the new Cruze is a standout highway cruiser. Now lighter than its predecessor, this compact Chevy feels every bit as substantial. The suspension soaks up the road with gentle, controlled motions. The quiet cabin isolates and coddles passengers with front seats that are just deep enough to cradle without constricting. The Cruze is a mid-size car for those who can’t afford or don’t need the real thing.

HIGHS: Quiet cabin, pillowy ride, torque.
LOWS: Shows a lack of enthusiasm when the road starts to curve.
THE VERDICT: The mid-size sedan for people who don't want the real thing.

That the Cruze drives like a larger car is mostly a good thing, especially for mileage warriors who spend hours on their commutes. But it also means that Chevy sacrificed the handling virtues that should be inherent in a compact car. The steering is alert on-center, but it maintains a numb lightness no matter the speed or how much lock you wind on. Fast corners are met with indifference, cushy body roll, and persistent understeer. The brake pedal also sits irritatingly high relative to the accelerator, forcing you to high-step your right leg to get your foot on top of it.

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The turbocharged engine delivers a glut of torque that the natu­rally aspirated engines can’t match. There’s a satisfying swell as the Cruze pulls away from a stoplight or merges onto a highway. The low-end grunt fades as revs climb, though, and the transmission compensates for a wheezy top end by upshifting 1000 rpm short of redline at full throttle. But its 7.6-second run to 60 mph still makes the Cruze the quickest in this test by a wide margin.

The six-speed automatic executes snappy gearchanges, only to be wasted on a tuning strategy designed to maximize fuel economy by short-shifting into a higher gear or hesitating to downshift when you apply throttle. The Cruze is the only car in the test with stop-start, yet that and its small-displacement engine weren’t enough to win the fuel-economy category outright. The Chevrolet tied our first- and second-place finishers at 33 mpg. Small-car fuel economy with large-car manners: It’s an interesting school of thought.

Second Place: Honda Civic

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Marc UrbanoCar and Driver

We’re glad to report that, after five years of hanging out with the wrong crowd at the back of the parking lot, Honda engineers ­haven’t forgotten a thing from their high-achieving days. The reformed Civic once again rides on a gold-star chassis. It brushes off big wallops with progressive damping and dispatches high-frequency stuff as if it were nothing. Tar strips and expansion joints are heard but scarcely felt.

HIGHS: Excellent ride and handling from a solid structure.
LOWS: A good CVT is still a CVT.
THE VERDICT: An all-around acheiver.

The excellence of both the Honda and the Mazda will convince you that lesser compact cars’ handling attributes are merely side effects of their ride tuning or cost-saving measures, rather than objectives unto themselves. In the Civic, a multilink rear suspension is helped by the test’s lowest center of gravity and a 121-pound weight advantage to deliver the highest cornering grip at 0.85 g, on pedestrian rubber no less.

The steering translates sharp on-center precision into immediate turn-in, but it’s never twitchy on the highway. And the humble urethane steering wheel is made into a beautiful thing with Honda’s meticulous graining and sculpting. A cavernous cockpit offers both the roomiest and most comfortable rear seat, yet the Civic still feels tidy thanks to clear sightlines. While our drivers all agreed that the driver’s seat is perfectly shaped, Honda installed it such that the front is lower than the rear and so taller drivers complained about a lack of thigh support. Honda’s seven-inch touchscreen, the antithesis of Hyundai’s easy-to-use system, relegates all the audio controls to the flat-glass pane.

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The Civic’s hardworking 2.0-liter reminds us that naturally ­aspirated engines don’t need to spin to 9000 rpm to be great. It revs smoothly and produces confident midrange pull with a strong top-end finish. It’s helped by a CVT that’s among the best in the business. The standard drive mode reliably interprets the gas pedal’s movements, and sport mode keeps the revs elevated without making things obnoxiously aggressive. As good as it is, the transmission may be the reason the Civic finished in second here. We could imagine the Honda earning the highest fun-to-drive score and reshuffling the finishing order with the standard six-speed manual. Regardless of the gearbox, this smart and fun car is once again ­living up to its potential.

First Place: Mazda 3

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While the interior dimensions don’t show it, the 3’s cabin feels like the most compact here. Both head- and legroom are in short supply for tall passengers in the rear seat. The cabin is ­finished with upscale materials, a fact that is largely lost in the sea of black that covers every surface.

The Mazda 3 is a specialist of sorts. The Cruze might be better suited to hour-long commutes and the Civic may be the better family sedan, but the Mazda 3 can perform either task while fulfilling a role that no other small car can. In the fun-to-drive category, where few affordable cars even try, Mazda makes the greatest effort and overwhelmingly succeeds.