We Took Three Cheap Hatchbacks on a Road Trip to Find the Ultimate College Car
Three bargain hatchbacks, one road trip, and a surprising winner that still holds up better than you'd expect.
Let’s say you’ve got what it takes to go to college (money). For your high-school graduation present, your parents—who love you very much but are looking forward to some peace and quiet once you’re safely ensconced in a dorm many hours away—have offered to buy you a set of wheels. The ground rules: It has to be cheap to buy and insure; it must carry a new-car warranty; it also has to have enough space for you to move your CD collection, Xbox, baggy-pants, and flat-screen computer the heck out of the newly christened guest room.
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The short list of what to buy inevitably is peppered with cars built in Korea. Parts and labor are cheap there, and the Korean auto industry is in its adolescence, so it doesn’t know how to build world-class cars capable of demanding top-dollar just yet. Kia offers the ovoid Rio Cinco (or five, as in the number of doors), starting at $11,905.
Ailing Korean automaker Daewoo recently was acquired by General Motors, so its offering is rebadged as the Chevy Aveo for U.S. consumption. It’s a retune of the Eurasian-market Kalos, with a larger 1.6-liter Opel-designed engine, revised steering and suspension tuning, and upgraded equipment, priced at $9995 to start, without air-conditioning.
Kia’s parent, Hyundai, isn’t trolling these waters anymore, but mighty Toyota is making a big splash with its youth-oriented Scion sub-brand. The xA model, based on an Echo cousin that’s sold as the ist in Japan, just barely limbos under our $13,000 base price bar at $12,965.
Our resulting threesome appears evenly matched. Their 1.5-to-1.6-liter 16-valve four-cylinder engines produce within five horsepower and three pound-feet of torque of each other, and their curb weights span just 165 pounds. Each is suspended by struts in front and a coil-sprung trailing twist-beam in back with front-disc and rear-drum brakes, though only the xA comes equipped with standard anti-lock braking (it’s a $400 option on the others, which our test cars lacked). Each also offers four doors and a hatch, but the Rio Cinco is an unabashed mini station wagon, with enough room behind the rear seat to carry a dog, a desktop computer and jumbo monitor, or a beer keg or two. The Chevy Aveo and Scion xA are more like squared-off hatchback models with cargo floors that are almost a foot shorter than the Kia’s, so their rear seats must be folded down to carry anything big.
Clearly, size is not all that matters when choosing an ideal college ride. Style, fuel economy, and fun count for a lot in this segment, so we decided to conduct a crash course on college/car compatibility. We packed our duffels, steeled our happy-hour tolerance, and hit the highway for a five-hour commute over Interstates and two-lane highways down into the rolling Hocking Hills, home of one of the Midwest’s most fun-loving colleges: Ohio University in Athens.
Here’s a CliffsNotes brief of the general lessons we learned: Entry-level cars have come a long way in the last five years. They used to have the look and feel of a gangly 16-year-old college freshman—meeting the technical requirements for the class, but without the maturity and social smarts to become popular. These days, the wheezing engines and the skinny 13-inch tires and poor suspension geometry that made for weak-kneed handling and aimless wandering on the highway have flunked out of the market.
Each of our contestants is a real car, worthy of consideration alongside low-mileage used cars from the big brands. They all arrived well equipped with alloy wheels, power windows and locks, tilt steering, air-conditioning, a rear wiper, and sufficient power and chassis poise to scoot around campus with some semblance of élan.
It’s time to get out the Bell Curve to rank them on their individual merits.
3rd Place: Chevrolet Aveo LS
Give Chevy’s new Aveo the once-over, and you’ll come away impressed. The interior has the look and feel of a car worth thousands—okay, hundreds—more than its $14,160 as-tested price. The sheens and textures, the circular vents and door handles all coordinate in a convincing attempt at functional, stylish design. And tall, upright seating front and rear affords basketball-team spaciousness, though the rear seatback is reclined too far, and latching the rear belts is often a two-handed job to prevent the latch from disappearing behind the seat cushion.
Outside, the look is clean and crisp with amusing jet-age character lines adorning the rear flanks. Our top-of-the-line LS model boasted a sunroof ($725), remote entry, a height-adjustable driver seat, remote mirrors (manual on the left, power on the right), and a CD/MP3 player with equalizer. The simple-to-operate, two-knob stereo with its 12 buttons and minimal gimmicks offered the fullest range of sound, thanks in part to its preset equalizer and four high-quality speakers.
None of these cars arrives on campus with a track scholarship, but of this trio the Aveo was least suited to sprinting, due to this triple threat: lowest power, highest weight, and tallest gearing. So, not surprisingly, at the dragstrip our Aveo trailed the pack slightly, hitting 60 mph in 10.2 seconds and crossing the quarter mile in 17.6 at 78.6 mph. Sadly, the tall gearing didn’t pay off at the gas pump, where the Aveo also finished in third place at 27 mpg over our 700-mile excursion, two to four miles a gallon behind the other cars.
At least the Aveo never feels like a rolling chicane in traffic; it climbs hills with relative ease, and it can merge into freeway traffic without inducing sweaty palms. When whipping the littlest Chevy hard, though, the engine note is fairly coarse, and the vague and imprecise shifter is hard to place accurately. Reverse is up and to the left after lifting a ring, and the feel through all the gears is not unlike that of a broomstick freeing a jammed garbage disposal.
The 14-inch alloy wheels shod in 185/60 rubber largely cure the wanderlust that plagued this mini-Chevy’s Metro predecessor, so the Aveo tracks straight and true even when splashed with the aerodynamic bow-wake from an adjacent semi. Its handling limits are quite respectable at 0.77 g, and its tidy dimensions make it easy to thread through a slalom course. Out in the real-world humps and twists of our backwoods romp, however, the Aveo was more difficult than the others to place accurately on a line. When approaching a tight curve, the driver turns in, but as the body rolls and the tire sidewalls deflect, corrections are inevitably required at the steering wheel to maintain the intended line. Perhaps the perception of body roll is exacerbated by the Aveo’s relatively taller, more upright seating position, but we noted no such non-linearity in our other cars’ steering.
Most of the Aveo’s foibles are rooted in the fact that it was designed entirely by Daewoo—GM was able to tweak only the shocks, steering-rack bushings, and other detail items. If it were the least-expensive car here, as equipped, and if it offered a long Korean warranty like the Kia does, or even if it offered a bit more cargo utility, it might just have snatched the Salutatorian ranking from the nearly equivalent Kia. On the upside, it’s sold and serviced in 4328 Chevy dealers nationwide, most of whom likely will be willing to cut a pretty good deal, which could easily tip the scales in the Aveo’s favor.
