Chevy Quiz: How Many SS’s Are in Excess? June 18, 2006
After disappearing for many years, the famous SS nameplate is now plastered on nearly every car in the Chevy lineup.
BACK in my high school years, in the early 1990’s, my parents had a decrepit Subaru DL wagon. A few days before its date with the junkyard, I customized that rusty Subaru with one of the most revered badges in muscle-car history: “454 SS,” rendered in reflective mailbox stickers applied to the front fenders.
Skip to next paragraph MultimediaGraphic: The Label Stands for Super Sport, but the Messages Are Mixed
A famed nameplate that works overtime.
Around the time I created my faux SS, Chevrolet was revitalizing the badge with wicked vehicles like the 454 SS pickup and the Impala SS muscle sedan. Today, nearly every car in the Chevy lineup has an SS version except (mercifully) the Aveo and (strangely) the Corvette. There are also two SS trucks, the TrailBlazer and Silverado. But is this proliferation of all things SS really good for the brand?
When I slapped SS badges on the Subaru, the joke was obvious. Now you can go to your Chevy dealer and buy a four-cylinder, nonsupercharged Cobalt ($17,490), possibly with four doors and an automatic transmission, that wears SS logos. And they’re not mailbox stickers.
Most car companies’ go-fast divisions employ easy-to-summarize game plans. BMW’s M cars are high-revving, high-horsepower technology showcases. Chrysler’s SRT vehicles offer extreme performance for the money. The Web site for Cadillac’s V-Series — www.cadillacunder5.com — underscores the V-cars’ common ability: each of these high-performance Cadillacs can reach 60 miles an hour in less than 5 seconds.
To get people excited about a message, it helps if they can understand it in the first place. But Chevy’s SS lineup is an automotive pot-luck dinner: “Hi, Suzy, I brought a V-8-powered front-wheel-drive coupe with Dale Earnhardt Intimidator logos. I hope that’s not what you brought!” “No problem. I cooked up a supercharged autocross demon, and Harry baked a four-door hatchback that looks like the second coming of the Chevy Citation X-11.”
Unlike Cadillac, Chevy would have a hard time pinning down a theme that could serve as a Web address for the SS lineup. The SS vehicles are fast (the TrailBlazer SS) unless they’re not (the Cobalt SS sedan’s four-cylinder engine turns out 171 horsepower). They have exclusive engines unavailable in other iterations of the same model (the Impala SS’s 5.3-liter V-8), unless they don’t (the Silverado SS’s 6-liter V-8 can be ordered in lesser Silverados).
The SS lineup is front drive (Cobalt, Malibu, Malibu Maxx, Impala, Monte Carlo), unless it’s rear drive (Silverado, SSR, base TrailBlazer SS) or all-wheel drive (TrailBlazer SS AWD).
For good measure, the fastest car General Motors has ever made, the Corvette Z06, also resides in Chevy’s lineup. And it is not an SS.
Despite the scattershot approach, there are some compelling vehicles here. My first exposure to a modern SS car came in the passenger seat of a Cobalt SS Supercharged ($20,490) on the infield road course of Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C. At the wheel was Dale Earnhardt Jr. As he pounded the car around the short track, I was surprised by the Cobalt’s composure at the limit.
Cars with front-wheel drive have a tendency to understeer — to lose grip at the front tires first, while the rear end has traction in reserve. From my seat, the Cobalt felt exceptionally neutral for a front-drive car. As Junior bent the SS into the corners, I could feel the rear end rotate and point the car into the turn, evidence of careful chassis tuning. A few laps later, the Nascar star managed to hang the rear end off the track into the dirt in glorious “Dukes of Hazzard” oversteer, causing his race-team handlers to call a halt to the fun.
Most front-drive cars wouldn’t have done that, short of pulling on the emergency brake halfway through the turn. The Cobalt SS Supercharged, on the other hand, challenges the driver to handle a four-wheel drift, and even oversteer, as Earnhardt discovered. Chevy tuned the chassis for enthusiasts who will know how to wring the most from it, instead of dumbing it down for the people who make scuff marks on Jersey barriers. The über-Cobalt’s 205 horsepower isn’t going to give you whiplash, but it puts the car in the same ballpark as the Volkswagen GTI and Honda Civic Si.
The Cobalt SS Supercharged ($20,490) does have an overwrought wing on the back, but if you live in the city someone will soon steal that and leave you with a clean-looking little coupe.
Moving a step up the food chain, we come to the Malibu SS, in both sedan ($23,490) and Maxx hatchback ($23,890) body styles. The Malibu, like the nonsupercharged Cobalt, demonstrates that Chevy is a tad too free with the SS badges. The Malibu SS reminds me of the “Frankenstein wastes a minute of our time” sketches on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” wherein Frankenstein’s monster excitedly leads the camera around the studio, and then triumphantly points to a completely ordinary object, like a light switch.
Like Conan’s Frankenstein, the Malibu’s SS trim promises to lead us to something exciting, but when we pop the hood we find a 240-horsepower V-6 hooked to a four-speed automatic transmission. A Honda Accord V-6 makes 244 horsepower and is available with a six-speed manual. The new Toyota Camry V-6 packs 268 horsepower. So what’s all the fuss about, Malibu SS?
The Malibu SS isn’t a bad car for the money — built on the same architecture as the Saab 9-3, you can look at it as a poor man’s Saab Aero — but it’s not exciting to look at and it doesn’t provide enough power to justify the chest-thumping.
Club SS should have a velvet rope manned by a 300-pound bouncer who is armed with a simple mandate: if you’re cool and fast, you get in. If you’re the Malibu — terribly sorry, we’re at capacity. You’re going to have to wait, oh, forever.
Unlike the Malibu, the Impala SS and Monte Carlo SS (take your pick for $26,990) suffer no shortage of power. With a 5.3-liter, 303-horsepower V-8 crammed between the front wheels, what they lack is traction.
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- Author : arnold
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