We took our first ever 2010 long-term car on a trip from Dubai to Ras-Al-Khaimah, partly as an excuse to test the highway behaviour of the Chevrolet Malibu LTZ on a long drive, and partly to meet our resident desert-safari-driving friend, who happens to live in that rocky city.
The Chevy Malibu LTZ has now become my main mode of transportation, as my Jeep and BMW start gathering even more dust than usual. The Mallu is proving to be a rather comfortable ride, while also keeping up appearances. It looks like a luxury car after all, and behaves like one too.
I first asked General Motors’ old PR agency for a long-term test car back in 2005. At the time, they couldn’t comprehend why anyone would need a test car for more than 2 days, let alone some start-up website. Since then, we’ve asked others, and they all rejected us, mumbling something about the “quality” of our audience. But things have changed. Online is in. Chevy design is in. The new GM is in. And the new GM now has cool new PR people. They recently started a long-term test program, and we are only the second people to get a long-termer from them,
More of an intentional leak, design sketches for the 2012 Chevrolet Malibu were filed with the U.S. patent office, after which they automatically became public property.
There was a time when General Motors poured all their resources into developing full-size 4x4s such as the Chevy Tahoe. The U.S. operation had pretty much sidelined the sedan market, churning out midsizers so embarrassingly bad that they turned to their Australian and Korean outfits when it came time to expand the GCC line-up. But as Americans started to give up their ever-hungry trucks for fuel-efficient cars, the General came up with the all-new “award-winning” Chevy Malibu.
This test was done to celebrate the U.S. IIHS safety institute’s 50th anniversary. The IIHS is a non-government organisation that conducts crash tests on new cars. It is generally accepted that today’s cars are softer and crumple more easily, compared to the hard-boned cars of olden days. So they decided to pit a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu against a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air to see which one comes out on top.
The 2010 Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan, slotting in between the Epica and the Lumina, will go on sale in showrooms across the UAE and GCC starting this October. Considering the “misaligned” status of Chevrolet’s existing midsize sedans when compared to the Japanese competition, the Malibu is as mainstream as it gets.
The all-new Chevrolet Malibu has been on sale in the U.S. for a while now. The midsize sedan had finally become an equal competitor to its Japanese rivals in the States, but the GCC line-up was making do with a lopsided range consisting of the Korean Epica and the Australian Lumina, neither of which has a 4-cylinder engine that could compare with those in the Camry, the Accord and the Altima. So General Motors decided to bring the Malibu here again, after a gap of nearly a decade.