The Best and Worst GM Cars We've Ever Driven

The Best and Worst GM Cars We've Ever Driven

Video Transcript

- Well, it's safe to say we've probably driven more cars than the average person. Do you guys have favorite and least favorite GM cars that you've driven to date?

- Well, I guess unlike Byron I believe, most of almost the entirety of my GM driving experience has been in a professional capacity. I've driven cars, though, since like 2006. And so within that time frame, I'm going to keep it to there. And I was tempted by the Pontiac G8. That was a really cool car. It had a lot of-- it was from Australia. So it had a lot of wacky pants interior stuff, which made it kind of interesting, and charming, yet also bad.

But it looked fantastic. It was fantastic to drive too. C7 Vette, again, you mentioned that the CS-- or actually no. The last CTS-V, that thing was great. But I'm going to say the original Chevy Volt is the best that I've driven because of just how significant it was, not unlike the Bolt. But how much of a technical achievement it was. It was a plug in hybrid. They called it any number of marketing things. But that's what it was. It was a plug in hybrid way ahead of everything else. And it was such a solid concept.

It was revolutionary just not just for GM, but for the entire industry. And yeah, it only had two back seats. And the ones that there were cramped. And the aero dam on the front scraped on everything. Everything. It's molehill-- everything. It scraped on everything. But and yeah, it wasn't as cool as the concept car. But it was a terrific city car.

I drove that-- back in the old days, we had one that was a long termer. And I drove it constantly in LA traffic. And it was fantastic. It had one pedal driving, it was pretty quick with that electric motor, it had that low center of gravity that the battery ran down the center of the car in a T fashion. So you had it literally glowing in the center of the car. Really grounded. It was surprisingly fun to drive.

Really kind of cool interior controls, touch capacitive, which were eh. But at the time, pretty neat. Had the white kind of iMac center console.

- Oh man. Yeah.

- And I drove it a lot. I love that car. And because it was a plug in hybrid, you could actually take it on a road trip. It was pretty comfortable. And decent trunk space. It's a really cool car. I think it does-- I hope it gets remembered for being-- maybe it didn't end up being a big seller, maybe it wasn't as important in the long run. But at the time, it was a big deal. And I think it was a pretty big achievement and GM at its best.

- Did you ever drive the Cadillac version? I can't remember what the Cadillac version of the Volt was--

- ELR? I did. I did.

- What did you think of that one?

- Well, interesting. Because that thing was actually really good too. It is mechanically the same thing. It had this lovely interior, it looked pretty cool. But the price was hilarious.

- Yeah.

- It was announced and we all laughed. This is-- we laughed because it was so outrageously insanely expensive that we thought they were kidding.

- Yeah.

- Well, that was the one that actually-- Cadillac offered like a, I don't know if they called it a performance package, but a sport package for that one that actually had a sport tuned suspension and stuff too if I remember right, I think it was maybe later in life, near when they canceled it. But I think that happened. Oh, and they actually-- so yeah, they actually retuned the powertrain too. So it wasn't just that it handled better, but it actually got more punch, which did reduce its total range.

- All right, Byron. What do you got for your favorite?