Last weekend, my wife and I rented this 2017 Chevrolet Impala from Alamo to make the 600 mile round trip to visit our sons who are spending the summer at their respective colleges. Will, our younger son is in south-east Ohio at Ohio University and his older brother, Chip, is in south-west Ohio at the University of Dayton. We live in Cleveland. The impetus of the trip was to drop my 2002 Monte Carlo off at O.U. for Will to use and dinner with Chip was an add-on bonus. Alamo had a special and with our 2006 Tahoe not getting any younger and gas getting super expensive, it made sense to rent something more economical.
I had driven an Impala LTZ in the not too distant past and was fairly impressed with how it rode and drove so I assured my wife, who had her eye on a CVT equipped Nissan Maxima, which was another level up from this (meaning: more expensive) that the Impala was going to be a swell ride. Keep in mind this car we rented was an Impala LT and not an LTZ.
I've never been enamored with this current iteration of the Impala. I find it too long, too narrow, too ugly and the interior, despite the size of the car, is too cramped. Our black on black rental here did come nicely equipped with power everything and it had blue tooth - not that we could figure out how to use it. The interior styling is a pleasant enough, although, again, it's tiny in relation to the overall size of the car. I'm no giant at barely at five foot nine and my right knee banged up against the side of that massive center stack; it was as if I was too big for the car. Some would call this cozy while others, myself being one of them, would call it somewhat claustrophobia inducing.
Despite power everything including the front seats, I couldn't get totally comfortable and find a driving position that I felt at home with. On short jaunts I think the car would seem ok - for instance on a ten minute test drive - but on a long trip I found the lack of comfort exhausted me. My wife drove part of the way too and I found the passenger seat to be even more uncomfortable than the driver's seat because it lacked one of the driver seat adjustments. Weird. I don't remember if the LTZ has better seats or not but the seats on our rental were so uncomfortable that I would not buy an Impala LT because of them; not that I was seriously considering that in the first place. Dash layout and what is referred to as "ergonomics" were quite good although we found the "infotainment" system, which included the blue tooth, a bear and a half to operate. We never touched it. The AC too; not intuitive at all.
Despite the design of the car and uncomfortable front seats my biggest beef with this car was its overall performance. That LTZ I drove and hammered into oblivion had an upgraded wheel, tire and handling package and was as robust a handling car as anything I've driven lately save for that BMW M240i friend Blake got recently as a loaner. Seriously - that LTZ rocked. This thing, though, bobbed and pogo sticked like softly sprung GM boats of yore. This car had less than 40,000 miles on it, high for a fleet car, and maybe those were hard miles and the struts were shot. Who knows. Sorry, I'm not going to run down to the Chevrolet store to test drive another LT like this to see if that's the case.
Most importantly, our rental did not have GM's heroic 3.6 liter V-6 that LTZ did but rather GM's 2.5 liter, DOHC, 16 valve "ECOTEC" in line four cylinder engine. Making 200 horsepower and 191 pounds of torque, remarkable numbers for a non turbocharged engine of fairly modest displacement, on paper, it should have been more than adequate. Again, on paper. In the real world of 80 mile per hour interstates and rural two lane highways, not so much.
Problem is the engine is what the experts refer to as, "peaky". Meaning it has to be turning very fast to get the most out of it. Maximum horsepower is achieved at 6,300 rpm - holy shit balls - and max torque comes around at 4,400 rpm. That's a lot of work that needs to get done before anything really happens - and in a 3,800-pound car, the big-little 2.5 liter ECOTEC is just simply overwhelmed. All said, the big four has a lot going for it with none of the horrible shaking and vibration of big four cylinder engines from the past. And it's great on gas. Thing is, it's just over matched for a car this heavy. Even with its slick shifting six speed automatic, often times I'd nail the gas and the engine would "windmill" requiring me to push the pedal to the floor and keep it there hoping something, anything, would eventually happen. It most times did but it wasn't a pleasant nor fun experience.
There's some saying out there about not being able to save money and be profitable at the same time; if the only good thing I can say about this car is that it's remarkable on gas, it's probably not worth the savings. Still, we were able to rent this thing and gas it up for about the same amount of money that it would have cost us just to use our Tahoe. Yes, the weekend special at Alamo was that good and our road trip illustrates just how bad the gas mileage is on our Tahoe. Pain in the ass to schlep down to the airport to get it and drop it back off but in the end, to save some money and keep the miles off the Tahoe, mission accomplished.
I can't tell you the last time I rented something and came away from it saying that I'd seriously shop for it when the time came to get a new car so this super bland fleet Impala LT is nothing out of the ordinary. As long as our boys are within a day's drive and our daily drivers are delicately geriatric or are gas guzzlers we'll continue to rent cars for our weekend jaunts. Stay tuned for another adventure. Perhaps next time we'll get that Maxima.
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