The tiny crossover market has been red hot.
Basically leading a resurgent US auto sales phase.
You don't want to be missing from that card table.
Let's see how good Chevy's hand is as we drive the new 2015 Chevy Tracks.
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Now, the Chevy Trax is Chevy's newest in their crossover and SUV portfolio.
It's also, as you can see, their smallest.
I think it's got really nice clean lines for the first three quarters or so.
And then it gets these chipmunk cheek rear haunches in the quarter panel that don't work for me.
It's a four-seat vehicle, really.
Maybe put a little kid in the middle in the back.
But when you fold down the back, it's surprisingly commodious for carrying cargo.
It goes up against Nissan Juke, FIAT 500L, and Jeep Renegade.
The game.
Now the cabin on the Trax as you can imagine is pretty basic and spartan, but I gotta say they gotta modern interesting layout here, starting at the instrument panel, you have this sort of motorcycle inspired layout that Chevy's been doing in their very small cars in the last couple of years.
Come over here to the head unit, and here's the star of the show.
Most of what you see here is standard, like OnStar 4G Hotspot in the car.
The 7 inch touch LCD with what I think is one of the better looking, and fairly logical interfaces out there.
In general, this head unit has great meta tag display for whatever source you're playing.
But it is irritating how any adjustment of the volume.
Clobbers anything else on the screen.
There is no volume knob anywhere.
Everything is an up and down tap, either here on the bezel or over here on the wheel.
Eventually that just drives me nuts.
I want a knob for volume.
Climate controls are simple.
There's no automatic temp control on this car, just turn it back and forth from blue to red, the way you used to do.
I'm gonna show you some of the features now on this head unit.
AM and FM radio, no HD radio interestingly enough, satellite radio's optional on higher trim level that's not always included, picture and movie seems silly to me it's like what, I don't need to do either of those that high on the menu.
Your phone menu of course brings you hands free calling and Bluetooth streaming on the media side.
Those are your apps, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn and BringGo's your navigation.
This car may have the record for the cheapest optional nav.
All you need is to pair your smart phone, spend $0.99 for that app, and you've got in-car navigation on the dash.
Two glove boxes, the one on the top has USB and auxiliary.
Backup camera is also standard on all tracks.
There are cars that cost three times this much that don't do that.
You also got anti-lock brake standard, a very good stabilitrack stability system standard and by the way this guy is an iihs.
As a safety top pick on crash ratings.
Drive controls are simple.
You've got a true conventional automatic.
To get into your shifting mode you come back here to m for manual and then you've got this fussy toggle here on the shift lever.
The combination of that and no presence of paddles means this is not set up as a driver engage.
Vehicle.
[MUSIC]
One more note, while head and shoulder room were real good in the Track, leg room never felt like enough.
Okay, let's talk about the Track's engine.
Where to go?
Here it is, down here.
1.4 liter turbo charged in line four sitting side saddle driving the front wheel typically.
All wheel drive is optional for a very good price.
We'll get to that later.
You're always gonna have a six speed automatic transmission.
Not a CVT.
Not a DCT.
Just a garden variety automatic.
Your horsepower's 138.
You have 148 pound feed of torque.
Now it all comes out in the wash in the MPG.
26/34.
Really quite good.
Though you get a pretty big haircut if you go all-wheel drive.
So, I'm a little sad to say that the track's driving [INAUDIBLE].
Dynamics aren't.
Kind of a gutless wonder to be honest.
The engine doesn't do anything criminal its just not much of it for some reason.
The numbers are actually okay, but I think the transmission is very much asleep at the switch even if you manually shift it.
Much more kudos to the head unit.
Living with it day to day I really do like it.
It's simple, it's clean, it looks pretty good and except for a few weird sort of organizations [INAUDIBLE] Quirks, it's very nice, for this price point.
Now, we have a Trax LS, that's your base model.
And that's gonna come in just a tick under 21,000 delivered.
$1500 is all you pay for all wheel drive.
I'm gonna leave that out for now,' cuz not everyone's gonna want that.
But then there's one upgrade that definitely gets you CNet style.
And that goes from LS.
to lt.
For $2300 that gets you satellite radio the only major media that was missing.
Cruise control, remote start, and some other nice cities around the car.
You might also consider the sun and sound package.
$1,400 for the seven speaker Bosri.
And a power glass roof.
So adding in all those toys, but leaving out all we could drive, we're still under $25,000 for a car that's credibly CNET style.
