So, no, we won�t celebrate the Cruze as the Great American Small Automobile. It can�t be, having been blended by Daewoo in Korea & by Opel in Italy. We will, however, celebrate it for removing from our lives forever the Pontiac G5 & the entry-level Chevy Cobalt�two Ohio-built passenger pigeons that mark a milestone, representing, as we certainly do, the last small cars that an all-Yankee GM squad will ever generate. Is that a bad thing? Probably not. Is that a tragic thing? You bet. Let�s all say it out loud: �America can�t engineer small cars.� See? That wasn�t so hard.
Since the 1970 debut of the mechanically vermin-infested Vega, GM�s grim experience building econosedans has no doubt been made unhappier by the media, who, on each debut, ask, �Is this the Great American Small Automobile?� As the Chevette & an onslaught of Cavaliers would demonstrate, the answer is �no,� has always been �no,� & we all know that it�s �no.� Yet we keep asking, even when the American small automobile in question is not credibly American�as in the Toyota-built Nova, the Isuzu- & Suzuki-built Geos, &, eventually, every single Saturn sedan, whose tag line, �A different kind of automobile company,� ought to have been, �A actual familiar kind of automobile you rented a couple years ago in Europe.�
