If any of these apply to you, you can stop reading this review as this is not the car for you:

-you have a family of 5 or plan to drive 5 people most of the time (it's just to small to do it comfortably)
-you want sporty car that's got get-up-and-go


About my car:

-I bought this car in February 2002 so at the time of this review I have driven my Sunfire for over 2 years
-I currently have 72000km on the odometer
-after all this driving I now average about 9.0km/100L mixed city and highway mostly city
-the transmission is a Getrag 5 speed manual that grinds in first and second
-I've taken this car in for the following warrantee work - broken fan switch, ABS light

All in all the car was pretty much what I had expected it would be. I had rented this car prior to purchase as sort of a long term test drive so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. The engine that I have in this model is the standard non-Ecotec 2.2L 115 engine as at the time of purchase the 2.2 Ecotec was fully out in Canada yet. Because of the fair displacement this engine has the low-end torque is decent but the high end horsepower is definitely lacking on top of the fact that high-revs in this car seems to do nothing other than create more noise. The two major drawbacks I find with this car are the manual transmission and the fact that turning on the air conditioning turns the 115 HP engine into what seems like a 50HP scooter. The Getrag tranny in the GMs have had performance issues and this is a major complaint of many GM owners. The best way to describe the problem is that when staring from first the gear will make a considerably loud grinding noise that goes away as the RPMs climb and then return as you shift into second and then go away again a the RPMs climb. The noise is rarely heard in third and never in higher gears. Although GM has tried fixing this with changing the tranny fluid and other adjustments/tweaks, many GM owners still complain that the noise returns after driving a while. For more info try this link http://www.j-body.org/forums/read.php?f=11&i=61983&t=24710&start=0. The second major issue with this car is the inherent lack of power when the A/C is turned on. Climbing small hills and even starting from a stop become a labourious task for the engine for some odd reason. This is a lesson to me to never pick an under powered car again.

Though my recommendation for this car is a "Yes" this only applies if you want to save your money for other things like food and housing (like myself) or you don't really care what you drive as long as it gets you from A to B.
Amount Paid (US$): 14130
Condition: New
Model Year: 2002
Model and Options: SLX (Canadian)