For those bitching about the styling, keep in mind this car has been around for 5 years. It's not some new design, and in all honesty it's just an evolution of a 12 year old cavalier. This doesn't make it look any better of course.
Now you see the shit we've had to put up with for so long?
Styling is boring, but if one good thing is to come of the HHR/Sky/solstice/Cobalt all getting this engine... is they will be hugely plentiful in junkyards in the next couple of years
Regardless of how boring/ugly the car may look, if it drives as good as I'd like to hope it does, it should be one fun to drive commuter car.
No. What made you think that?
I'm more interested in the no-lift shift feature. Imagine GM advocating power shifting with their transmissions.
Chrysler has it on the Dodge SRT4 (the original neon based one). I wouldn't doubt if they actually set it up to keep drivers from doing power shifts that might normally break parts, and while making it still do what the driver wants, it saves parts. Remember they are only interesting in keeping boost up, not necessarily rpms. Kind of a win-win situation really.
Well lets think about this logically:
You over thought it big time... they likely put a switch on the back of the pedal like on any brake pedal to light up the brake lights, combined it with some extra code in the ecu. Cut back on the timing a bit, keep the throttle open a bit and viola!
I'm actually a bit surprised I haven't heard about any companies being able to modify these electronic throttled turbo engines to have anti-lag, as everything you need is there, with excellent precision.
I believe the "previous record" was that of the Mazdaspeed 3. The performance figures for the two cars are nearly identical, I'd like to see both cars compared head to head.
Mazdaspeed 3 came within 4 seconds of it at 8:39, but their driver hadn't been on the track before and was contending with a lot of traffic apparently.
http://mazdanews.com/node/view/1123