Archive for the ‘Malibu’ Category

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air has been crashed into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu—in a head-on frontal-offset test, at 40 mph.

The result is not only interesting viewing for our inner gawkers; it's a lesson in how far occupant protection has advanced over the years.

Watching the modern Malibu, the hood area deforms significantly but the passenger area looks almost entirely intact. Shift your eyes over to the 1959 Chevy and it’s the stuff of old highway-safety and shock-and-scare films, just melodrama and implied gore. There’s plenty of car gore though, with the Bel...

A couple of months ago, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted fender-bender tests on a handful of minicars and subcompacts. The results weren't encouraging, with most scoring poorly, and only a few landing in the "acceptable" range. Now, the IIHS has conducted a second battery of tests -- this time on midsize sedans -- and unfortunately, the majority of those underperformed expectations, too.

Models tested included the 2009 Honda Accord, the 2009 Hyundai Sonata, the 2009 Mazda 6, and 2009 Nissan Maxima. According to the IIHS, each of those models showed improvement over its 2007 version, but none earned a rating of "good",...

In these days when being green and getting good fuel mileage is all the rage, why would the Malibu Hybrid go missing from Chevy's 2010 lineup?

It seems strange, but really, it's not.

Way back in 2006, I was in the initial wave of journalists to drive the new Saturn Vue Green Line, the first hybrid to come out of General Motors. The four-cylinder "mild-hybrid" powertrain in the 2007 Saturn Vue Green Line ended up in several other GM vehicles including the 2009 Malibu Hybrid.

Thinking way back to 2006-07 (see the photo that I took for TheCarConnection's first review of the Green Line). The Toyota Prius had already been on the market as a...