2006 Chevrolet Impala SS

Pros

FAST! Quality interior materials (finally). Silky smooth engine

Cons

See text

My wife and I picked up our new Black Impala SS last night. Here are my impressions:

The quality of interior materials is so good, it rivals that of any Japanese car maker including Toyota. This may be hard to believe considering GM's (especially Chevy's) reputation for low budget interiors filled with cheap plastic.

I could go on for hours about the motor! At idle it has a pleasing V8 burble that is subdued inside, yet quite noticeable outside. It can definitely turn heads considering the exterior's family car looks. The motor is exceptionally smooth. Acceleration is effortless, and the motor never sounds like it's breaking a sweat. No excessive noise, no vibrations to speak of, just plenty of go. The displacement-on-demand feature runs the motor on only four cylinders during light acceleration. Transition between 4 and 8 cylinders is seemless. At times, you can hear when the motor is running on 4 rather than 8, but this isn't meant to be a criticism. It's actually kind of cool sounding.

Acceleration feels definitely like it could hit sub 6-second 0-60 except for one thing: wheel spin. All through first gear, the traction control is fighting acceleration. The weird thing is that the traction control still limits wheel spin when turned off.

The trunk is cavernous. No need to say more.

The seats (leather in ours) are firm, yet comfortable. The 8-way power seats can give any driver a comfortable position. Ours has the heated seats. We had a very cold night last evening (for November - 25 deg) and the seat warmers really were impressive. At no time did my butt feel cooked unlike most other heated seats I have played with.

Braking is quite good. No mushy GM brake pedal feel, although my feeling is that the ABS kicks in a bit too soon for optimum deceleration.

Ride is firm, but comformatable and not jarring. On rough pavement however, you definitely won't forget this car has a sport tuned suspension. There is a minimum or road, tire or wind noise so the ride is rather quiet.

As far as styling goes, the interior is just about right. Exterior is a bit plain, and the nose looks a bit too much like an old Monte Carlo or a Lumina for my tastes. Then again, that's just my opinion.

Fuel economy is not bad for a V8 powered vehicle with such great acceleration. However, it isn't as good as the EPA numbers say. Around town (only 100 miles so far), the display reads about 16.5 MPG. Highway, about 26. Not bad, but not great. I presume milage will get better as the engine breaks in.

Audio system is quite good. The factory Bose system sounds pretty nice, but is, in typical Bose fashion, far from flat. The car has a 6 dsic, in-dash, CD changer that can also play discs loaded with MP3s. XM radio is built in. There are 36 memory presets that can hold any station on FM, AM or XM. So, you could load up all 36 with stations from one band if you wanted to.

An additional cool gadget is built-in tire pressure sensors in each wheel/tire assembly that show tire pressures for all four wheels on the dasjboard display. The precedure in the manual for relearning wheel positions after a tire rotation is a bit involved.

Downsides? Not too many. Here goes:
-The side view mirrors are much too small.
-No oil pressure or voltage gauges. I've come to expect these from Chevy.
-Nose styling.