It’s nice to see that General Motors is targeting the 2% of the population that has not already put them on a lifetime boycott list over the massive corruption of the GM bailout. As for me, there is no way in the world that I would buy a new or used GM vehicle for any reason ever, for the rest of my life. I also will not accept a GM as a rental, nor will I buy GM parts for repairs to a vehicle made by a less corrupt company. GM is dead to me - I don’t deal with crooks.
I went to pick up my rental car on Wednesday night and the company had 3 cars left under their covered parking area. The lot attendant said, “choose any of the 3”. 2 were GM products (2013 Camaro, 2013 Impala, old body style) and the third was a VW Passat.
I would have taken the Passat, but I have been curious to drive the new Camaro for a couple of years, so I took it. As usual, the rental experience convinced me that it’s yet another GM product I didn’t need to own.
I put over 300 miles on it while visiting a customer, and also rode about 100 miles with the customer in his 2013 GMC Sierra. The interesting thing to me is that the Sierra truck had the same feel/ride as the Camaro going down the road. You could only notice a difference going around corners because of the body roll. I don’t know if that’s a win for the truck engineers or a loss for the Camaro engineers.
But, in the the 1.5 days I had it, the Camaro failed to impress. The V6 felt dogged under 2k RPM and the transmission was mushy and slow. In addition, the brakes surprised me while stopping...didn’t feel up to the task of bringing the beast to a halt. It felt much heavier than a 3,800 lb coupe in both acceleration and braking. I imagine the V8 provides a much better driving experience, but other things like Chevy’s MyLink, the arrangement of the windshield wiper stalk, and the use the same quality digital numeric display as the 2000 Suburban between the tach and the speedometer really turned off any interest I had in the car.