Mobile Alabama isn't the kind of place you can get around in without your own wheels, so the good folks over at Alamo Car Rental were kind enough to rent me a nice, barely broken in (4500 on the odo), deep dark blue 2006 Pontiac Torrent to handle my cheap luxury travelin' needs. Over 3 days I managed to stack a couple hundred more miles on the odo, and came to appreciate the car's generally average and unremarkable demeanor.

Wanna know what the new Torrents are like??


Slick Lookin' Ride!
Although it's a larger SUV than I'd like, the styling is generally pretty slick. The family heritage it shares with the Aztek are evident, and the sleek angles remind me vaguely of the lines and proportions of an Acura MDX (but smaller).

Size-wise it's comparable to a Ford Escape or a Honda CRV, or maybe even a Subaru Forester. It ain't big, it is good lookin'.

The fit and finish is excellent. Even the door handles feel sturdy and solid. Doors clunk with a sturdy sound and feel. The roof rack is very solid and I love the sturdy lateral bars that provide usable support on all fours.

The standard 16" wheels look great, and I think the somewhat gentle look of the vehicle is a good fit to its role as a suburban mall cruiser. The tires are basic all weather tires --- entirely appropriate for its role as a basic suburban Mom ride, but they won't appeal to machos who want to think they're getting a truck instead of a car.

My only complaint at all about the exterior is the cheesy quality materials used on the rear bumper. There's a ledge kind of shelf at the top of the rear bumper with non-skid style surface. Evidently to use as a step when loading things into the topside luggage rack. It's not really firm enough to use as a step though. It flexes much too easily --- I'll bet you find a lot of cracked or damaged bumper/steps by the time these start rolling into used car lots a couple years down the pike.


The View from the Drivers Seat...
I have mixed feelings about how easy this vehicle is to operate. There's some good. There's some bad.

I like the general look of the dashboard, but I don't like the feel of some of it, and I find some aspects of the design to make no sense whatsoever.

I love the feel of the thick leather clad steering wheel in my hands, and I really like the way Pontiac laid out the steering wheel controls: especially having all of the cruise control buttons in one place.

I hate their window controls. They're ugly, they're badly positioned, and they're a pain in the tookus to use. Why? Well, because they're stuck in a weird place in the center console instead of being on the door where they belong. They have weird labels on 'em too, and they're positioned in a single row so you can't easily, by touch alone, figure out which is which. GM needs to hire a couple new product usability engineers.

I like the slick-looking red lights of the dash at night, though I don't know why they wasted space with a tachometer on a vehicle that you can't even get with a manual transmission.

I dislike the positioning of the shifter --- far too forward and up on the dash to feel natural, and I absolutely detest the badly designed center console area that wastes space and provides poorly thought out features: there's only one overly shallow drink holder on this car (and it's positioned down on the floor!), there's a too-shallow bin in the armrest, and there's a lot of wasted and unusable space that's open underneath the armrest. The center console on this vehicle is a good case study in really bad industrial design.

Visibility is generally good from all angles, and I like the adequate leg room even for a fairly tall driver.

There's good aspects about sitting in the driver's seat, but there's ample flaws as well.


The Passenger Perspective...
The best thing about riding in the Pontiac Torrent is the spacious leg room from every seat in the car. Front seat legroom is great, but even in the back with the drivers seat set to a comfort level for a 6-foot tall hombre (being me), my knees don't come anywhere close to hitting the back of the driver seat. Electric controls are drivers side only.

The seats are comfy enough for shorter trips, but I find them thin for heavier adults, and they lack lateral support.

Family guys will appreciate the kid-friendly back seat. Lots of space for three little people (but really only two adults). Getting more than two child seats in there would also be problematic (why is it that 3-person seats never seem to actually seat three people?) There's just one A/C vent in the back and no real independent on/off control for it.

In the back seat, I'm disappointed by the cheap feeling drink holder --- made of low-quality, brittle plastic, this puppy is probably going to snap off in a very large percentage of Torrents that are put into typical family service. Not critical in itself, but it's a symptom of poor quality materials, and you find the same issue popping up elsewhere in the car. In the cargo area, you've got thin, brittle plastic sidewalls that easily flex at the touch of a finger, and you've got insubstantial feeling door panels and low-grade carpet that doesn't feel like it's going to wear well.

I like the fact that Pontiac's designers implemented the tailgate with a swing-up design, but again, the poor quality materials show up in the clamshell handles to pull the tailgate back down --- the handles are hard to use, prone to slip, and worst of all, cheesy, brittle, and cheap.


Power and Performance...
Hope you want a 185 hp V6 with an automatic transmission, because that's your only option on the Torrent (unless you count having a choice between FWD and AWD).

I thought it accelerated well enough for basic family style driving, able to get up to highway speeds from a standing start within acceptable times (which I define as "before that Peterbilt comes crashing through the back window"). You won't outrun anybody in a real car, but you'll be competitive against delivery vans and Mercurys being driven by old men in hats.

Braking is acceptable. Not remarkable. Acceptable.

Steering on the Torrent is horrendous. The wheel feels soft and squishy and unresponsive and the performance is ponderous. It feels more like you're trying to turn a Ford Excursion than a smaller, theoretically more nimble vehicle. Driving the Torrent in an unfamiliar city means I was occasionally missing my turns and having to make U-turns, almost all of which turned into 3-point or 5-point exercises in traffic blocking.

My normal everyday rides are a Scion xA and a Honda Pilot. Of course the xA runs circles around the Torrent, but shocking to me is that even my Pilot turns noticeably tighter than this Torrent --- and the Pilot is a significantly larger and heavier vehicle. It ain't right!

In the Torrent, there is just no way to do a decent quick turn. Folks would honk at me. I'd honk back. They'd laugh at the tinny little girl beep-beep of my wimpy horn. I'd slink away in humble humiliation.

I really expected more nimble handling in the Torrent (or a bold-sounding horn).


Practicality...
Cargo handling is about average for this class vehicle. With the rear seats up, you can fit 4 cases of beer behind the seat without them sliding up and whacking the kids on the head every time you hit the brakes.

If you're carrying larger loads, you might be put off a bit by the way the seats fold down: they leave an uneven dropoff between the seats and the rear deck. While the front seat can also be folded "flat" to accommodate boards or other kinds of long cargo, it leaves about a 5 inch space of dead air between front seat pushed all the way back and rear seat. It's not a big deal, but neither is it a stellar example of great engineering prowess.

Fuel economy is poor, as it is with virtually all small SUVs. EPA rates it at 19/24. I didn't track my mileage exactly, but there's no way I was averaging even that high. The sucker just slurped down gas like me slurping down chilly brewskis. Gas might still cost slightly less than chilly brewskis, but it doesn't taste nearly as good.


Competitive Thoughts...
With prices in the low $20s, the Pontiac Torrent is joining an already crowded pack of small SUVs. Unfortunately, I don't view it as bringing anything particularly new to the table or offering a really good reason to even buy this class vehicle over the more practical sedans or mini-vans (which generally give you better performance, more comfort, better economy, and more all-around bang-for-the-buck).

I'm disappointed by the relatively lackluster performance of this car (especially the steering), lackluster fuel economy, and lackluster interior design and quality. In this class, I would probably favor the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 for their expected durability, or perhaps the Subaru Forester for better all-around SUV-like competence. Or I'd just head to a more practical class of vehicle...

Until next time, see you on the road ... Watch Out!