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I haven't had much good opportunity to populate around here lately, so much to do, so little time. We added another vehicle to the fleet the other day. What started as looking for new or slightly used ventured off into 'let's just get a bridge car' for awhile. Something that may be useful for not just my college kid, but also a budding HS kid who will be learning to drive soon. And, something that I may also be able to use to drive the 70 mile round trip to work each day and spell the miles from the van and TourX. Now we have to decide if we are going to get rid of the Grand Prix, which, it's probably time. Since the motivation here was more that I saw this on the dealer lot while I was taking new Mazda test drives. It was a good price and even with some strange body dings, it looked real good with its red color and new tires and all. And it had a sunroof, that was the ultimate hook. Surprisingly, to me it drove really nice... seemed like everything was tight on it and low miles, for cheap. This vintage of Malibu was never really top rated in its class at the time, but it had a lot of positives I overlooked at the time which I can appreciate more nowadays. But it was in a competitive market segment and so to improve even more, Chevy did a full redesign again of the Malibu for 2016. I actually did lease a 2016 Malibu LT and after all this time, its interesting to see the contrasts between the two designs in the rearview mirror of time. A couple photos here shortly.

ah, the elusive 'wheat' interior! totally gets rid of the dreariness of the usual all black. and unfortunately, with the CVT. The Malibu CVT is actually fairly responsive, but it didn't get better mpg than the 6 speed (I had a leased 6 speed and had rented a CVT). If you can ever find a 2.0 turbo with 9 speed auto and the wheat interior with sunroof, just like this one in the blue, that would the ultimate Malibu find. There is a very few out there! I wouldn't have changed to my TourX if this car would have offered an all wheel drive solution somewhere in the model run.