We had reserved a Chevy Impala or similar, but upon arrival to Sky Harbor were told that they were out of all full-size cars and we would be upgraded to a crossover for free. We got to know this beast over the next 5 days and 800 miles. There were no markings on it otherwise, so I'll assume it was the front-wheel-drive, 2.4L model.
Pros:
1. Lots of space for water bottles. The Equinox has lots of nooks and crannies which seem just about correctly sized for standard plastic bottles.
2. Very good A/C. This was particularly vital in August, in Arizona.
Cons:
1. Not materially larger than a VW Jetta. Sure the whole thing was up higher, but the interior height, legroom and trunk space weren't noticeably bigger that Marisa's 2007 Jetta.
2. Bizarrely deep center console. Like, down into the bowels of the car deep. Like, you can lose stuff into it deep. Why?
3. Very non-responsive gas pedal. This seems to be a hallmark of GM vehicles in particular. The transmission seems to divert all power to some mystery vortex, in effect giving the gas pedal 3 modes: off, hold speed and full throttle. This was particularly bad when driving up hill because "hold speed" actually translated into "slowly bleed speed", meaning I had to go back and forth between that setting and full throttle to keep my pace roughly constant.
4. Bizarre brake pedal placement. The pedal was at least 8 inches up from the floor of the car, meaning that if I had my heel on the floor, I could barely reach the brake pedal with my toes. Huh? Why? I literally had my foot slip under the pedal once when I was trying to brake.
5. Not very good seats. Everyone mentioned that the seats weren't exactly supportive or comfortable for longer periods of time.
6. Once I got up to highway speeds, I realized that the steering wheel is too low and obstructs the view of the top the speedometer. No idea how fast I was going unless I ducked down. I've noticed this in other GM cars (Saturn Sky, for example) as well.
7. At highway speeds, we noticed some rattling. This was not road noise, just poor construction quality in a car with 18,000 miles on it.
8. The car's suspension was also quite soft. This is expected from a soccer mom car, but the resulting bobbing and swaying did not play well with passengers prone to motion sickness.
9. Rolling the window down at highway speeds resulted in a very loud, throbbing WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP sound I'd never heard in any other car before. Unfortunately a lower volume variant of this was present even at 40-45mph, which is a totally normal speed at which to have the windows down.
10. To get the window back up (or down), I had to hold the lever the whole way.
11. When it turned to night and I flipped on the headlights, I had to find the inch-wide ring on the control stick to twist, instead of being able to grab any part of the end of the control stick and twist the whole thing. Why? The remaining, non-moving, end piece of the stick served no other purpose.
12. The dials to control things like the A/C fan had no physical settings, they were like a radio knob that lead to a digital readout (which was only shown right after a change in knob setting). Hence, we never knew what setting it was on. Not a huge deal, just kinda curious.
13. The rear visibility was poor. This is expected, and it does have a rear camera. However, that camera has no overlay so it's not really clear how wide said view is, what I may or may not hit while turning, etc.
14. Odd seat fabric. It has an overlay similar to a drawer liner, so every time you sit on it in shorts you leave with a fine fishnet pattern imprinted into your legs.
15. Easily left in the dust by a Honda Odyssey. Minivan soccer mom kicked our ass!
Rant:
While many of the above are quibbles and not really a big deal, I'd like to sound off about a few of these.
The brake pedal is flat-out unsafe. If my size 10.5 foot can occasionally slide under it, imagine what happens with your wife or daughter's size 6 feet.
The gas pedal issue is just bizarre. Every non-American company (Ford has gotten better) has figured this out. It's not a matter of how much power a car does or doesn't have, it's about actually putting it responsively to the road. Ideally (and with many other car makers' vehicles) a slight press of the gas pedal would result in a slight acceleration. Instead, the gas pedal has to be pressed pretty far down before the car actually downshifts and starts to accelerate at all. The Equinox has a 6-speed automatic transmission, which in some sense just makes the problem worse because on even a slight uphill the car has to downshift twice. The car is 3800lbs and has peak power of 182hp, so even in an ideal world it's not going to haul ass. On top of this, peak torque is at 4900rpm, which is a speed the engine really doesn't like to make it up to. This is just bad engineering. Bad GM, bad.
There's really no incentive to buy this car over, say, Marisa's Jetta. I don't think we would have been noticeably less cramped in it, would have gotten better overall gas mileage and could have actually accelerated. GM needs to wake up and realize that better engineering and driving characteristics are not something a lot of people ask for, but it's something they notice when they do drive.
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