LOS ANGELES: For some time now, General Motors has been promising us a brave new world of crossover vehicles – i.e. vehicles that combine the best qualities of several existing segments – and now they're actually starting to arrive.
We have the Pontiac Aztek already and soon we?ll get the Buick Rendezvous, and in about a year we'll see various iterations of the 2003 Pontiac Vibe, the crossover vehicle the world's biggest car company showed off at the recent auto show here.
"Vibe defies the traditional vehicle classification," said Lynn Myers, Pontiac-GMC's general manager. "It offers a spacious interior in the guise of a compact car, and the features of a sports car, sport wagon and SUV all at the same time. It rides tall, has available all-wheel drive, offers unexpected storage systems and cargo-hauling capacity, and features a surprising level of performance."
Vibe's intended to compete with Chrysler's PT Cruiser and Ford's Focus wagon, as well as a unit from Toyota that will be built on the same assembly line at the Nummi assembly plant in Fremont, California.
Coming off the same line as the Toyota model, the 5-passenger, 5-door Vibe should be extra appealing to those folks who appreciate that Japanese company's reputation for quality. It didn't much help the model (Chevrolet Prizm) which used to come off that assembly line and was actually a better bargain than its Corolla sibling, but Meyers and other Pontiac executives live in hope.