2011 Chevy Cruze vs. 2012 Ford Focus and Three More Compacts – Comparison Tests « New and Used Car Listings

2011 Chevy Cruze vs. 2012 Ford Focus and Three More Compacts – Comparison Tests

Even if two weeks’ worth of Maruchan ramen drains your savings account, there’s something about a rusting mid-’90s Accord on sagging springs that fails to inspire confidence among financial backers or real-estate agents. And when you and the missus are just starting out, you feel that need to be taken seriously more acutely than most. There are certainly cheaper new cars than the group gathered here, but—wrong as it may be—“cheap” is the only reputation many B-segment cars have.

Fortunately, respectability is booming among compact sedans as the class itself matures alongside its target customers. All five of the cars gathered here are new within the last two years, with the Hyundai Elantra, the Ford Focus, and the Volkswagen Jetta fresh off their debuts. And, while all five have entry prices of less than $17,000, an essential part of the startup mind-set is pretending you’ve already made it. We therefore checked out an example of each car possessing a sticker fiddled appropriately upmarket, with optional engines, automatic transmissions, and uplevel trims, landing them in the $23,000-to-$26,000 range. (Regrettably, there was no way to achieve stick-shift parity in this group.)

The elephant not in this room is the Honda Civic, a bestseller and all-around nice guy. Generation nine of Honda’s compact wonder was on the verge of introduction as this was written and thus unavailable for our testing, but watch for a mano a mano between the Honda and the winner of this comparo in an upcoming issue.

For now, our reigning segment champion is the Mazda 3, which prevailed over a Kia Forte and a Volkswagen Golf in a previous comparo . Newish last year, the 3 rides on a platform largely unchanged from the car that was introduced in 2004. Not a problem, we said, naming it to our 10Best list for 2010.

On sale in Europe for two years already, the Chevrolet Cruze is actually older than the 3, but it is newer to the U.S. market. It rides on a platform that shares virtually nothing with its predecessor—a good start. In replacing the Cobalt, the Cruze had small shoes to fill, and it has positively exploded their seams. In our first test, we said, “a Cruze, in a comparison test right now, might very well win.”