Insurance is paying for a rental for me to drive while the car is getting repaired, and it's a current gen Malibu. Considering I'll be driving it until at least the first week of June, I'll write a little review for fun:
If this is the state of the average midsize sedan on the market right now, I understand why the sedan market is doing so poorly. The car feels like Chevy was trying to make a midsize sedan feel as much like an SUV as possible. The interior is spacious but not in a good way, more like a way that makes it feel that any of the car behind the driver's seat is a mile away, which really messes with my perception of the road and environment around the car. Even when you know there are cars in the lane next to you near your rear quarters, it doesn't feel like there are, which at least for me in the MS3, I could always sort of perceive where other cars were around the car.
The mirrors are somehow smaller than an MS3 and have a strange shape that severely limits FOV, especially the rearview mirror on the windshield. The rear glass feels like the same approach was taken to this car as the Camaro, basically giving the car a sliver of view behind it. The A and C pillars are at atrocious angles where they restrict basically exactly where you would need to see when looking in those directions. The infotainment screen is in a borderline dangerous location, lower down and in the center of the dash (around where the CD changer is in a non-tech gen2), which requires the driver to full reposition their head and look down from the road just to check the time.
I could forgive all of this for just being new car shit that a stubborn luddite like me just doesn't like if not for once central complaint:
The maximum weight of the steering wheel with its full EPS is QUITE LITERALLY EQUIVALENT to the weight that my steering went to after my car went full slip and locked the brakes in the front during the accident. There is positively not an ounce of feedback from the tires through the steering column and when turning the wheel for more than just a lane change/gentle curve, it feels borderline dangerous.
The brakes are no better, because they're touchy in the least predictable way possible: an inch or so of vagueness that doesn't even feel like it actuates the master cylinder and then a little further down the brakes grab hard without the pedal really stiffening up all that much, so it catches you by surprise. This is possibly from me having a manual daily, but the sensation of a CVT attached to a gas engine is genuinely unsettling because it eliminates the subconscious vehicle speed reference that the gearing/shifting of even an automatic car give the driver.
Cars like this make it crystal clear why so many drivers with newer cars and all these driver assists are still so inept behind the wheel: the cars they're driving have literally zero feedback and feel like driving a simulator on the lowest settings, while the bodies work very hard to make you feel like you're in this huge, invincible tank of a car. It doesn't feel dangerous to them because they don't know/remember when it was different. I feel similarly about other newer cars I've driven, namely the 2022 Corolla sedan, 2023 RAV4, 2018 XC-90, and 2023 Traverse, most of the complaints are the same. The only newer cars I've felt that don't succumb to these issues nearly as bad are Mazdas and some BMWs, as the ones I have driven ('21 CX-9, '20 mazda3 hatch, '15 mazda3 hatch, '14 mazda6, '18 330i GT) have always had decently responsive suspension, ample feedback in the steering, and the car feels like the exterior is appropriately compact/visibility and perception of other cars is not a concern.
TLDR the Malibu sucks donkey balls, if you're in the market for a newer midsize get a used 3rd gen Mazda6
