Chevrolet Malibu Maxx SS (2023)

This Malibu Maxx SS painted in Laser Blue Metallic is about the same color as the bolt of lightning that killed my pal Jeff's 1974 Cadillac. Actually, it wasn't lightning so much as an electrical arc. Maybe it was an electrical arc; we don't know for sure. The old Caddy just stopped running one day while we had a screwdriver stuck down its distributor.

Who's Jeff? He is a GM man, one of the few from Generation X. He lives in the Long Island suburb of Plainview-we're not making the name up-with his wife and new baby, his antique Cadillac, an Oldsmobile Alero, and a Chevy Malibu company car. He drives about 50,000 miles a year and goes for a spacious vehicle that doesn't cost much and gets decent fuel economy. The Malibu Maxx SS makes him hot. "As a company rep, I aspire to that car."

Chevy has been putting traveling salesmen in a sweat for 45 years by gluing the Super Sport badge to workaday sedans. The Malibu Maxx, Chevrolet's slightly funky, somewhat frumpy bobtail wagon was burning for the SS treatment from day one, which for the Maxx came in 2003.

True, the Maxx is already a Gauloises-smoking bohemian at the Chevrolet of baseball, hot dogs, and apple-pie fame. It rolls on GM's front-drive Epsilon platform, which it shares with European cosmopolitans from Saab and Opel. To American eyes, the body is a somewhat runty-looking cross between a family sedan and an ice chest, but it speaks to the Continental preference for hatchbacks. The chassis is also stiff and relatively sophisticated. Check out those cast-aluminum arms in the multilink rear suspension. Were autobahns consulted in the making of the Maxx?

With a thick spear of chrome splitting its face, the old Maxx looked as if it were wearing orthodontic headgear. For 2006 the Maxx gets a more straightforward array of grilles, and the SS receives extra silver accent rings. It's a simple change that, like having braces removed, works wonders for the smile. The SS also receives a spoiler on the hatch, some rocker cladding below the doors, and a square-jawed front bumper with a chin spoiler and fog lights. Inside the 225/50 Goodyear Eagle LS-2 tires are 18-inch alloy wheels with five very thick, very square spokes that look ready for the big torque.

The SS badge is really about the engine, and at the $24,690 base price (ours had only a $325 satellite-radio receiver increasing its sticker), the Maxx SS gets more of it. This is still a 60-degree iron-block pushrod V-6-and you were expecting . . . what?-but the bores grow by three millimeters and total displacement rises from 3.5 liters to 3.9. A variable-length intake plenum optimizes airflow, and a new variable-valve-timing system rotates the cam to crack open the intake valves (and yes, the exhaust valves, too) earlier or later depending on the motion of your right foot. That's a first for "cam in block" engines, says GM.

Snigger if you wish. Say that's like being first out with a black-and-white plasma-screen TV, but pushrod cam phasing is a new wrinkle worth noting and a widget that even the Corvette doesn't have.

Ultimately, easier breathing is what the fuss is about, and the 3.9 revs hard and fast with an unusually crisp song that we're unaccustomed to in GM's pushrod V-6s. It also doesn't gasp at the far end of the tach, winding to the 6200-rpm redline with a steady, consistent push. We'd be hooting even louder if this 3.9 were making, say, the same 250 horsepower and 242 pound-feet as the overhead-cam 3.5-liter V-6 in the Saturn Vue Red Line. That engine, by the way, is made by Honda, which knows a thing about squeezing out horsepower. Output from the Maxx SS is 240 horses at 5800 rpm and 240 pound-feet of torque at 2800 rpm, which is still an upgrade of 39 horsepower and 19 pound-feet over the 3.5-liter V-6 in the Maxx LT and LTZ.

Chevy gives the engine just four speeds to work with and an up-and-down button on the shifter if you want to change your own gears. After toggling into and out of overdrive a few times, the novelty wears off. The automatic's computer doesn't hate to downshift, so you rarely feel the need to take over. When you do, the button quickly becomes second nature to your fingers.

It's not an American car if it can't lay rubber. The Maxx sure does--a good 20 feet of it if you disable the traction control. Neighbor's party kept you up last night? Blast 'em out of bed at 7 a.m. with a burnout that will set off fire alarms. More judicious control gets the Maxx through a quarter-mile of asphalt in 15.3 seconds at 91 mph, having whisked past 60 mph in 6.9 seconds. The speed governor checks in at 115 mph. In a race to 60 mph, you'll clip a base Maxx by 0.9 second, which seems a small difference to a clock but is a substantial one to your keister. The fatter tires contribute to better stopping from 70 mph--177 feet versus 191 for the base Maxx, which has the exact same brake discs--and more athletic cornering. The Maxx SS pulls a stable 0.83 g on the skidpad; the base Maxx chews its tires at 0.78 g.

Chewing the front tires was a behavior we noted often in the base Maxx. The SS corners with far less understeer at speed, whether through extra rubber or better tuning of the suspension or both. We thought the electric motor providing the power assist was supplying unusually good feedback until we realized there's no motor. In the Maxx SS, GM replaces the electric-power-steering servo with a hydraulic one, and the SS tracks a turn flatly and impressively faithfully to the path you aim it along. Granted, it does try to aim itself under hard acceleration, tugging at the rim with torque steer, but the change in steering hardware is definitely applause material.

What body motion there is during quick driving gets restrained by the suspension to small, controlled movements. Even Chevy is joining the handling religion. Handling and ride? There's still some learning to do. For such a modern suspension, the Maxx SS's supplies a leaden ride in the style of Big Three performance packages of yore. Over bumps the floor shivers with impact clunks and resonant vibrations. There's always an acute sense of the metal in motion down below. We've seen much worse out of Detroit before. The Maxx's body feels tight and remained rattle-free, and the bump harshness is fairly tolerable.

You can have any interior color in the SS as long as it's black (your exterior paint choices are silver, black, white, and Caddy-killer blue). Except for some silver-painted plastic and chrome glints here and there, the Malibu is as dark inside as a film bag. The supportive front seats are dressed in a black vinyl-and-cloth mix accented by a cross-hatch pattern that looks like it belongs in a mid-'70s Porsche. A three-spoke steering wheel with a strange but inoffensive squared-off rim adds to the sport atmosphere. Adjustable pedals are standard.

The back seat is the star, as if the designers started with a living-room love seat and put a car around it. It is spacious, with 41 inches of legroom and a bottom cushion that slides back and forth to expand the baggage capacity as needed. The rear seatback tilts to three positions, and the daylight pours in through two skylights, which have retractable shades. Fold the Maxx's seats flat to open the already generous cargo hold from 23 cubic feet to 41.

If there's a betrayal, it's the SS's cheap trimmings. Ragged mold partlines are everywhere. Several plastic trim pieces feel as if they were secured by bubblegum and a prayer. There's this sense that if you turned the car over and shook it vigorously the entire interior might fall out. There are no overhead hand grips for front-seat occupants, and the trim around the skylights appears to have been cut out with dull scissors. If GM didn't build cars as if it expected to discount them, maybe it wouldn't have to.

Speaking of price, this SS's $25,015 as-tested sticker (less whatever spiffs are offered this week) comes in a shade below the $25,380 of the Maxx LTZ, which has leather seats and a few other refinements but not the maximum-bore V-6. We could drone on about idle quality and interior materials, both of which are better in a Honda or Toyota. We might mention that the more agile Mazda 6 wagon costs about the same and offers a stick. Our man Jeff doesn't care. You'd have had more luck telling Bella Abzug that they're running a special on corsets. Jeff is a GM man.