2016 Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid Second Drive

Muscle Shoals, Alabama, might just be another small town in the American south were it not for FAME Recording Studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. You might know it best for the line in “Sweet Home Alabama” referring to The Swampers, the house band at FAME before leaving to found Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. You may not realize everyone from Aretha Franklin to The Rolling Stones to The Black Keys has recorded at one of the two. To drive through the town today, as we recently did in the new Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid, you still wouldn’t know the history here. FAME sits next a CVS Pharmacy. Muscle Shoals Sound Studio is in a residential neighborhood a few blocks off the highway on a road going nowhere important.

Despite its history, Muscle Shoals isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think music. New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville all leap to mind. In the same way, Chevrolet Malibu isn’t the first car that jumps to mind when you think high-tech. The Malibu’s had some rough years, but like a band on the reunion tour, it’s finally cleaned up its act and put out a surprisingly good new album. Like Muscle Shoals, though, it isn’t making a big screaming deal about things. FAME has a modern mixing board in the original studio, embracing its history and keeping up with the times, but it isn’t trying to be anything it’s not. That’s sorta the same story with this Malibu Hybrid. It’s got Volt technology and claims second-best-in-class fuel economy, it’s a rolling 4G LTE hotspot, it’ll play nice with your Apple and Android phones, and it can be equipped with semi-autonomous driving technology. None of its competitors can say all that.

What’s most striking about the Malibu Hybrid, though, is what it isn’t. Chevrolet has resisted the urge to mess with the Malibu’s handsome lines for the hybrid model, something that’s gotten the competition into trouble in more than one instance. No silly looking wheels or oddball grille inserts or any of the other “LOOK AT ME, I’M A HYBRID” gimmickry that too often afflicts hybridized sedans. Yes, there’s an argument to be made that early adopters like unmistakable styling, but hybrids are past the point of early adopters now, and most midsize sedan buyers don’t want or need “I’m green” billboards on their car.

There are only three obvious hybrid giveaways on the Malibu. The first is the smaller trunk, which is as tall and wide as the gasoline models but not nearly as deep. By the tape measure, you lose 4.2 cubic feet of space, which mostly means it’ll be harder to fit big suitcases in there. The other two giveaways are less obvious, one being a little “H” badge on the trunk and the other a power usage gauge in place of the tachometer.

The most important place you won’t find typical hybrid weirdness is in the brake pedal. Regenerative braking and mechanical braking being entirely different technologies, they feel quite different in the pedal, and the handoff from one to the other is often awkward. Not so here. Like Honda, Chevrolet has switched to a brake-by-wire system, which blends regenerative and mechanical braking automatically to maximize the energy captured by the battery. A side bonus is that brake pedal feel is generated artificially, so the engineers could tune it to feel like the mechanical brakes in every non-hybrid car out there. As a result, you get firm, linear, and consistent response from the brake pedal at all times, and it’s matched with linear, predictable stopping power. After all, the last thing you want under heavy braking is any uncertainty about how the brakes are responding.

If you prefer even more braking control, you can always up the level of regenerative braking. Chevy made it unintuitive by labeling it as “L” on the shifter, but it works like this: In “D,” you get very little regen, barely enough to notice even if you’re looking for it. Drop it to “L” and you’re actually in “L2,” as indicated in the corner of the information screen in the instrument cluster. This is moderate regen. Hit the +/- rocker on the shift knob and you can drop it to “L1,” which is heavy regen and will slow the car surprisingly quickly. Barring any emergency situations, you can effectively drive the car with only the throttle pedal in “L1,” or via the steering wheel controls if you have cruise control activated (by increasing and decreasing the set speed).

With all the computer input and artificial brake pedal response, this system doesn’t give you any feedback from the mechanical brakes, but then this is a midsize hybrid sedan we’re talking about, not a Corvette, and it’s not something most buyers will notice or care about.

Also absent from the Malibu Hybrid is any sense of the gasoline engine/electric motor handover. The only real indications the engine has started are a bit of a growl from up front and a very slight vibration. The system decides for itself how much of each power source to use and how to blend them in real time, the result being a seamless experience from the driver’s seat. Engine noise goes up and down, but the gear-free transmission and myriad clutches sort it all out and leave you with smooth, linear acceleration both from a stop and at speed. Thanks to the EV motors’ instantaneous torque, the Malibu Hybrid feels strong and confident leaving a stop and accelerates nicely onto the freeway. Passing requires a lead foot, but convince the computer you really do want to throw fuel economy to the wind temporarily, and it will supply ample power to overtake the slowpoke ahead. An instrumented test of an early prototype revealed the Malibu Hybrid will hit 60 mph in 7.4 seconds, which makes it quicker than most four-cylinder midsize sedans and one of the quickest midsize hybrids on the market.

Not only is it quick, but it’ll corner, too. Calling the Malibu Hybrid “sporty” would be too generous, as it clearly wasn’t designed to be a demon in the curves. But while it doesn’t beg for visits to the race track, it does handle quite well when the situation calls for it. The steering is precise, and the response is linear. Pushed harder than any buyer is likely to, the Hybrid manages its body movements well and avoids the usual family car tendency to understeer immediately. The fuel-economy-optimized tires offer an impressive amount of grip without making any untoward noises.

If the tires did scream, it’d be one of the few things you’d actually hear in the cabin. Tire noise is about the only exterior sound to penetrate the Hybrid’s cocoon, and even if it’s a fair amount of tire noise, it’s still damn impressive given how hard it is to make a car’s interior quiet when there’s no engine noise to mask outside sounds. There are more than a few luxury cars on the road that aren’t as quiet inside as this Malibu.

It’s also pretty comfortable in there. The Malibu is well-damped and handles bumps and holes nicely, blunting impacts and mitigating their jolts and noises like a car of a higher-priced class. The new cabin is spacious and airy, with a back seat finally worthy of taller adults.

There are a few places it could be better. The plastic steering wheel that comes standard is acceptable on a $23,000 Malibu, if not ideal, but it’s tough to stomach at the nearly $30,000 starting price of the Hybrid. Getting it wrapped in leather is part of an $895 option package, which also upgrades the information display in the gauges to full color. It’s 2016; these things should be standard on a $30,000 car. By the same token, the cheap-looking plastic capping the door sills at the base of the windows ought to be as rich as the rest of the materials in the cabin. Same goes for the collision warning light that’s been stuck on the dash ahead of the instrument cluster and casts a big reflection on the windshield.

On the tech side, Chevrolet’s implementation of Apple CarPlay could use a little more work. The most annoying glitch comes when running audio and navigation simultaneously, as when the navigation voice prompts cut in, the system tends to get confused about the audio source and plays music from your phone’s library rather than whatever source you had it on. This isn’t endemic to the Malibu, so hopefully Chevy can get a software patch out and fix everyone’s problem at once. Finally, the power usage gauge in the instrument cluster could use better labeling, as it’s rather confusing with a tri-colored line, a picture of a battery, and “kW” as the only markings. Maybe a scale or something less cryptic than “kW.”

I’m also interested to see how the Malibu Hybrid tests against our Real MPG equipment. A roughly 150-mile drive through Tennessee and Alabama that featured mostly highway driving barely moved the needle on the gas gauge, though the onboard computer was only estimating a 40 mpg average for the trip. Granted, we have lead feet and onboard computers are notoriously inaccurate, but the 47/46/46 city/highway/combined EPA rating had us hoping for a bigger number.

On the way back to Nashville, I passed the General Motors plant at Spring Hill, Tennessee. Once the home of the defunct Saturn brand, today it’s producing luxury crossovers for Cadillac and GMC. In the same way Spring Hill was rescued from the doldrums of a dying brand and given a sparkling new opportunity, the Malibu is finally enjoying a much-needed renaissance, and the Hybrid model is without question the Malibu to buy. Put another way, if the Malibu only came as a hybrid, it would’ve been a Car of the Year finalist last year rather than a contender. Pretty impressive when you consider the last generation car routinely hung out in the bottom of the class. It’s not perfect, but it’s finally worth talking about.

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