An economy gem.

We have 3500 miles on our new Cobalt and are quite pleased. Checked first tankful and got 33.5 mpg on mostly highway miles, with occasional A/C use. While Toyota or Civic seem to get 5 mpg higher, the Cobalt was enough cheaper to equal the difference. Bought a manual transmission which will maximize fuel economy. In my opinion, 4-cylinder cars don't have enough power to spare to allow for the inefficiency of an automatic transmission - especially if you have to run A/C at some point as well.

American car companies apparently can't quite equal Japanese fuel economy because they stick to bigger engine sizes. The advantage to this would be a peppier car, but I'd like to maximize the mileage at this point.

The sound system is great for an economy car. I've rented an Aveo since we bought this and didn't like it nearly as well. Sound system was tinnier than the Cobalt's.

Fairly elegant dashboard layout. The selector buttons for the dash displays are hidden by the steering wheel and my hands though. Wide variety of display choices for an economy car. Only flaw encountered so far is a little plastic door on the dash that hides the "trunk open" button is already broken and sags open a bit.

Ride is excellent. Kind of unbelievable for an econ car. Much better than the Toyota we drove. Ditto for the driver's sitting position. (You need long arms for the Toyota layout, and something still isn't just right.) Rear seat is way short of leg room though.

Trunk capacity is huge. Rear seats fold down so you can haul stuff or even sleep in there in a pinch. Tradeoffs to big trunk are lack of rear leg room, and hard to see out rear window when backing because trunk is so high.

After incentives and gm card discount, paid $12,400.

Oddly enough, the car battery is under the floor of the trunk.

Designed well enough that it was easy for me to transition back to economy car after spending last 17 years in full-size suburbans and pickups.

UPDATE: Now have over 7,000 miles on the car. Recent check of highway mpg yielded 36.3 mpg while averaging traveling at 74 mph. (Had found tires only had 25 psi in them so inflated to 40 psi.)

Also wanted to mention Chevy's nice touch having an automatic support for an opened hood instead of a manual rod like most economy cars. Further improvements over my last economy cars are that you don't have to push a button on the steering column to remove the key, and you don't have to hold exterior handle up while locking doors.