Chevrolet Spark 2013: A New Model To Ignite The Micro-Car Market

If you’re looking for an affordable city car that’s easy on gas, the new Spark may strike your fancy. The four-door subcompact, which is built in South Korea, gets excellent fuel economy of 32 mpg overall and 42 on the highway and has a surprisingly usable rear seat. If offer a relatively nice assortment of features, including aluminum wheels, a touch-screen audio system, Bluetooth, and 10 air bags.

Chevrolet Spark

The Spark is affordable; we paid $15,420 for a midlevel 1LT version with an automatic transmission. And it measures a foot-and-a-half shorter than a Honda Fit, so parking is super easy.

But parking might be the most fun you have with a Chevy Spark. It has sluggish, patience-testing acceleration; a 0-to-60-mph “sprint” takes 13 seconds. The best we can say about the stiff, jittery ride is that it’s better than the buckboard like Scion iQ, another city car. Despite the Spark’s commendable space utilization, the front seats are narrow enough that your shoulders and hips hang over the cushions. And then there’s the cabin noise, a relentless assault from all quarter.

The Spark is affordable; we paid $15,420 for a midlevel 1LT version with an automatic transmission.

All of this contributed to a meager overall road-test score of only 34, one of the lowest in recent years and way too low for us to recommend the car. The Spark is too new for us to have reliability data.

Pounding the pavement

Power comes from a dinky 84-hp, 1.2-liter four-cylinder engine mated to a four-speed automatic transmission. To save gas it clings to the highest gear available, robbing pep, and it jerks while hunting between gears. The Spark struggles to keep pace, and the engine revs loudly a lot of the time. A five-speed manual transmission is also available, which, in our brief experience with it, provided livelier performance.

The interior has bright colors and accents, although the plastics and fabrics look and feel cheap.

With its small footprint and stiff suspension the Spark is highly maneuverable, but the steering provides almost no feedback. It posted a high speed threading our avoidance maneuver, with no unpleasant surprises. But pavement flaws deliver stiff, rubbery kicks into the cabin, especially from the rear.

The interior has bright colors and accents, although the plastics and fabrics look and feel cheap. Despite high seats and ample head room, the cockpit still feels tight and narrow. The steering wheel tilts but doesn’t telescope, forcing a straight-arm reach for some drivers. The front seats are lumpy and very firm. On the positive side, the rear seats provide adequate head and leg room for two adults, unlike other mini-cars or even the larger Chevy Sonic.

The touch display takes a lot of finger tapping to get things done.

The motorcycle-like gauge cluster looks cool but is cluttered and picks up some reflections. Dominating the center dash is a 7-inch touch screen that controls audio and some smart-phone functions. It lacks traditional buttons and knobs, even for volume, and the fussy touch-screen equivalents give no feedback. Many functions require several taps to get what you want. At least the Bluetooth connectivity sets up easily and works well, and there’s Pandora and a USB port for connecting portable music players.

The space behind the rear seats can hold just one large suitcase, but with a little fiddling the 60/40-split rear seatbacks fold down to make substantially more cargo room. In lieu of a spare tire, the Spark supplies just a tire pump and a can of puncture sealant.

The space behind the rear seats can hold just one large suitcase, but with a little fiddling the 60/40-split rear seatbacks fold down to make substantially more cargo room