Gadgetory

the Chevy Malibu is as mild-mannered as any car the midsize sedan segment but it's pretty modern to think of it as Clark Kent with a smartphone let's take a look at the 2014 Chevy Malibu and check the tech a midsize sedan is more of a practical purchase than an emotional one with this kind of car the entire family chimes in its got to meet a lot of needs now that Chevy Malibu does pretty well in all considerations it's a comfortable ride gets good fuel economy and it's got a lot of interior space the design is pretty conservative this car really blends in it's kind of the opposite of ostentatious we see a lot of the standard Chevy design cues like this grille with the bar right across hosting the bowtie and then back we've got those big square taillights that they're using these days underneath we've got them at first in style suspension in front and in back we've got a four link independent suspension that's pretty standard stuff for this type of car but Chevy does a really good job of giving this car a nice ride now let's take a look under the hood to see what motivates this thing under the hood here we've got the base engine for this car it's a 2.5 liter 4 cylinder from Chevy's Ecotec line it's got direct injection that sprays fuel directly into the cylinders now it's interesting about this is it's not quite as loud there's a lot of direct injection engines you don't hear that clattering of injectors which you do on a lot of these types of engines now this engine makes 196 horsepower at 186 pound-feet of torque that's to the front wheels in this transversely mounted engine it's a decent amount for this sized vehicle the best thing though is it turns in EPA estimates of 25 miles per gallon city 36 miles per gallon highway that's why Chevy's gotten to this direct injection engine here it's a pretty efficient now this isn't the only engine you can get for the Malibu Chevy also offers a 2 liter 4-cylinder with a turbocharger alcee uses direct injection that gets 259 horsepower 295 pound-feet of torque that's a lot of power that's actually more than a lot of v6 is produced but you also take a pretty big hit in fuel economy that'll get 21 miles per gallon city 30 miles per gallon highway it's a little lower you get mid-twenties fuel economy get a lot more power that's gonna be ninja that some people are gonna want but this base engine will do for better fuel economy all around now let's take a look at the capita and see what this car is really all about at the top of the stack here I have a 7-inch color touch screen this comes with a seven hundred ninety five dollar navigation package and this interface will look fairly familiar to smartphone users because it's all icon base this is Chevy's MyLink infotainment system and all icons are the same size they look pretty much similar we've got one for navigation different audio sources phone different offline information sources here as well on the sides of the bezel we have these capacitive touch areas here so I can go straight to navigation just by hitting that or I can go to destination by hitting this side got my phone button here and I can go back to home that will bring me back to this this icon view there's this source area up here for the capacitive touch bezel and I don't really like this as much this doesn't bring up an audio screen this merely kind of scrolls through toggles through the different audio sources so he doesn't bring you directly the audio source you gotta keep on hitting it and go through the different ones now if I go to the navigation area I get this nice pretty good looking map it's showing me traffic of course on the major freeways around the area here I'd like to see a little more coverage for the surface streets too a lot of navigation systems are actually covering more surface streets with navigation so I'm not really seeing that I don't know if that's because there's no traffic problems around here right now or it just doesn't cover that area now when I go to enter a destination I hit this area like I mentioned before and I get a lot of options for destination I can do address entry I can search points of interest previous destinations all I good stuff I can even go to actual GPS coordinate entry now I've also got this thing called travel guide this is a pretty cool feature I like this a lot I bring this up I can search through a lot of local points of interest these aren't businesses necessarily these are things you might want to find if you're on a road trip and you're just kind of looking around for something interesting to see of course we got our phone area here and we've got the normal stuff with the phone system integrated here I can take a look at my phone book and see all my different different contacts those are visible on the screen here I could also hit the voice command button and bring those up but just say call Wayne Cunningham or something like that and it'll give me the options for the numbers I have stored here and place that call right away voice command in this car also works with navigation and it lets you say the entire address in a single string which is nice but I haven't been very successful with it I've tried to say the the alley run right now Tehama Street and that's a tough one for a lot of cars some get it better than others this one never got it once so hmm not so successful with that the cooler thing though is so I've got an iPod attached here I can also have a USB Drive go to that and I can actually hit voice command and say play an artist to play a song or play an album so I'll try it right now play artist frightened rabbit and it finds all the songs I have by that artist brings up I can see it's plane right now so that's pretty cool now this car also has Siri hands-free I could use that for navigation too if I didn't have a navigation system here or any of this good stuff so that's the the MyLink infotainment system here one thing Chevy announced at the Consumer Electronics Show this last couple of weeks is they're gonna add something called app shop I don't know if this is gonna just be on the 2015 Chevy Malibu and not on this generation or they might retro actively update it'll be nice to see so down on the console here we've got the shifter for the 6-speed automatic transmission this is a pretty standard transmission for this class of car right now but one thing this has is a manual mode which you don't always see that often so I pull it all the way back put it in the manual mode and I got this rocker switch on top of the shifter that actually lets me go through the gears I need to use this in situations like if you're going down long descent you want to hold it in third or something like that they use engine braking to get down the hill or maybe some situations where you're going up a slippery Hill it's fairly steep and you want to keep it in a single gear without having an up shift and change your torque at your wheels so now let's take this thing on the road I wouldn't call the driving character of the Malibu really engaging but it is very very easy and that's very appropriate for a midsize sedan one thing this engine does have to help it safe so that any tenant auto stop feature so if you're stopping the stoplight or something it will stop the engine for you and sometimes those features aren't done very well sometimes they're they really are they're really intrusive but in this car you barely feel it at all one thing we have in this car that is part of the entertainment and electronics package are a lot of driver alert features so this gives us a rear-view camera when I put it in reverse that blind spot monitors and those will put little icons on either side mirror if there's a car back in my blind spot on either side that's a really nice feature to have there's also a Lane Departure alert so if I were to drift across the lane line like if I was drowsy or something like that it would be that'd be most interesting feature here is the collision this is really just a warning it won't die hit the brakes for you but the a collision warning it uses this camera looking forward as does the lane departure system Sagan camera and that if you're coming up on another car too fast or you know slower traffic maybe if you're distracted by something it will actually flash a red light on the inside of the windshield and it'll give you an alert - and that'll kind of tell you it's time to hit the brakes cuz you're about to hit a car in front of you all right let's price out our 2014 chevy malibu this model in 2lt trim goes for twenty five thousand two hundred fifteen dollars adding navigation for seven hundred ninety five dollars that gets you the touchscreen and also we have the electronics and entertainment package that gives me that collision warning blind spot monitor rearview camera and the upgraded pioneer stereo system that package cost one thousand seven and fifty dollars and with a few other options in here total price for this model is thirty thousand one hundred twenty-five dollars the chevy malibu faces a lot of competition in the midsize sedan segment there's better-looking cars like the Ford Fusion of the mazda6 but one thing the Chevy Malibu has going for it is that MyLink infotainment system it's definitely one of the better infotainment interfaces I've seen and it's got a lot of good features we also have OnStar which has a lot of good telematics functions so that might sway you in the purchase of this car