The small car segment has often taken the brunt of our low scores, partly because the purpose for small cars is to offer affordable transportation (which for some reason has always gone hand and hand with boring). I also believe the lack of any good design is because their target audience doesn't really care what the car they drive looks like, At Car Grade these people are known as the "evil ones".
The 2011 Chevy Cruze unfortunately did not veer from affordable boring transportation. From the front the Cruze looks like the rest of the fleet. The Cruze wears the signature bar across the grill, and from there everything is very predictable. The head lights move across the front of the vehicle and then plunge rearward coming to a vampire like point near the top of the front quarter panel. There is no unique light styling with the head lights as a whole, very utilitarian. The Cruze does sit well on its chassis and gives off an average over all visual. The side panels are plain and no thrills, which would be good if the car had some flair somewhere else. I concede that it is hard to put any real lines on a compact car just because of their nature, their short, but I won't give up hope that it can be done.
The back of the Cruze is already old in our eyes. The bar across the back is predictable and stands out because it doesn't match anything around it. On each end of the bar are oddly shaped tail light casings that are complicated by perfectly round tail lights. The two features don't work together at all. I'm not sure if this was an attempt at brand recognition, because the Cobalt (which the Cruze replaces) had the similar odd shape with a perfectly round light pattern.
There are a couple design features that stand out enough to talk about. First is the "triplicate rear window". So you have the rear passenger window, next you have a smaller window that has tinting that seems irregular. If I had to guess I think the tinting is that way to make your eye believe the window ends there, weird. Then you have a solid black plastic piece that carries us to the end, very messy and strange.
The other feature about the Cruze's design that we didn't like is near the front wheel well. One (yes there are two!) of the horizontal lines starts at the top of the fog light casing and rounds over the wheel well, yikes, horizontal lines should be for the most part horizontal! The line then comes up and ends under the side mirrors. Then another line starts near where this one ends but lower, which then travels the length of the vehicle and ends well, however two lines makes a short car seem even shorter.
Well, hate to say it but the "Evil Ones" win again!
2011 Chevy Cruze
Grade : 5
This is interesting information about the Cruz. I have been looking at one at the Chevy in Grand Rapids and actually really like the designs and everything about the car. Thanks so much for this article. I think that it looks great the way it is. I am just glad that it is great on gas.
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