My Malibu Story
Background
I was getting tired of dumping money and time into an aging 1989 Ford Taurus.
It had 265,000 km on the odometer. It was always leaking something and practically the entire
car had been rebuilt but the body was slowly rusting away. The Taurus had several mods on it
including a high flow intake, performance Mallory TFI ignition module from SummitRacing and a bunch of
other improvements which gave it gas mileage of about 24mpg city and 33mpg highway. It handled and cornered
like a hot damn after replacing the struts and springs on all four corners. Its turns were especially
flat with very little body roll and no tire squeal. In summary, I was getting tired of the rust.
Failures on the Taurus happened at the worst times. The alternator died in a left turning lane which we
ended up having to push the car through the intersection. The power steering up blew up at -40C and made big mess all over the driveway. I had finally
had enough.
Doing the research in the spring of 2005, the choices were pretty clear. Taurus was mediocre since they were still
running the same engine/tranny combination since 1996. Dodge/Chrysler's safety rating at IIHS was very poor.
The Focus was too small and I needed a family car with some room. I'm 6'4" so that eliminated many
other cars. With the great safety rating from IIHS, the best in class interior space, best in class gas mileage,
zero down and 0% financing, it was a no-brainer. I bought the Malibu from Wetaskiwin Chev Olds in March.
Wetaskiwin treated me well - much unlike our local dealer in Edmonton. In the summer of 2005 was the first vacation with the Malibu.
Going from Edmonton to Loon Lake, Sask, then down to Elbow, across to Drumheller,
through Banff, and into interior B.C. finally stopping at Merritt. The trip from
Merritt back to Edmonton surprised me. Over 1069km and it was the same tank of gas from Merritt, to Logan Lake, back to
highway 1, to Kamloops, and north through Jasper back to Edmonton. The real time gas mileage was 5.9L/100km or 48mpg!