Review of the new Chevrolet Lacetti - Value, Quality & Design

Six months in a Chevrolet Lacetti. It might not be a dream assignment but it's been an interesting one. Expectations obviously have to be managed a little when we're talking about a full-sized, well equipped family hatchback for under £10,000 but once you've got your head around this, there's plenty to enjoy about the Lacetti's simple competence.

For a start, nothing major has gone wrong with the car and that's a factor that's never to be underestimated at the budget end of the market where the Lacetti operates. We've managed close to 10,000 miles of faultless reliability over the twenty seven weeks we've been running it. That's a substantial distance that goes some way towards dispelling the preconceptions that surround low cost vehicles.

Buyers with £10,000 in their back pockets, have vast swathes of the used car market at their mercy with all manner of desirable possibilities leaping at them from the small ads but are you really better off with a pre-owned model than a brand new Lacetti packing a full warranty? It's largely a matter of taste with a little bit of luck thrown in but there's going to be some uncertainty attached to any used car purchase and our experience with the Chevrolet, although limited in the grand scheme of things, has been reassuring.

The Lacetti isn't the last or the first word in chic, modernist car design but it's not an ugly looking thing and is never going to polarise opinion in the way that some of today's trendier hatchbacks do. Leave it in any suburban supermarket car park and the majority of people won't notice it and those that do will have very little opinion one way of the other. Ordinary? Boring? That's about as extreme an opinion as anybody's likely to have on Chevrolet's offering, so if you like your car to do the A to B thing without making any kind of fashion statement or revealing anything much about the person who's driving it, the Lacetti fits the bill.

"With the Lacetti, what you see is what you get"

It's more of the same in the interior. The layout is simple and reasonably functional, many of the plastics feel on the cheap side and the cloth covering for the seating isn't something you'll be running your fingers over for the sheer pleasure of it. You can see where the money that goes into creating the interior ambiance of plusher hatchbacks hasn't been spent here but that won't matter to the Lacetti buyer. The car is comfortable enough to sit in and the basic equipment that you wouldn't want to do without is included as standard. Rear seat accommodation is quite generous provided the front seats aren't right back on the extent of their travel and there's a surprisingly big boot that could easily take the family's luggage on a week away.

Storage is never in short supply though, with no fewer that 25 different places to put your odds and ends dotted around the cabin. Special mention goes to the water bottle holder next to the handbrake (that's ideal for those 1.0-litre bottles often sold at filling stations) and the box under the armrest that takes a good handful of CDs.

The driving position in the Lacetti is quite polished. There's only rake adjustment for the steering column in the 1.4-litre model we've been testing but that hasn't hampered a number of differently proportioned drivers in getting comfortable. The gearlever is well located as well and its action around the gate is positive if slightly 'long throw'. The suspension is well judged, giving reasonable composure at the kind of cornering speeds that most owners will attempt and good ride quality even over difficult surfaces. The weighty steering helps make the Lacetti a relaxing motorway car without sacrificing convenience when parking or turning at lower speeds but the wheel could be attached to an oil tanker's rudder for all the feedback you get from it. The Lacetti isn't a car that responds well to being driven quickly but if driving quickly isn't your thing, it's not half bad.

You're never going to get savage performance from a 1.4-litre engine in a car this size but the Lacetti's powerplant pulls well enough. It's been found out on a few occasions, one in particular when a full load of passengers and luggage meant that 1st gear and full throttle had to be engaged to crest a particularly steep hill, but otherwise complaints have been rare. Refinement is particularly good with the measures taken to soundproof the cabin really paying dividends on longer trips. We've averaged around 35mpg on the test and that's more than respectable.

The Chevrolet Lacetti was never a car destined to set the motoring world alight with its technology or design innovation. It's a fairly standard and unremarkable hatch with a low price. Buyers seeking a decently sized family car with inoffensive styling that isn't going to cost the earth to run will like it and our experience with the car has been preferable in many ways to the time we've had with more advanced products with ill-judged features that try to be too clever by half. With the Lacetti, what you see is what you get. Buyers need only decide if what they see is what they want.