Six months ago my wife and I decided it was time to buy a second car. When we moved from Arizona the year before, we sold our second car and just brought along our 2001 Tundra (had to tow my racecar, ya know). We got by with just one car for a year, but it was time to make our transportation scheduling a little easier. We wanted an inexpensive, reliable, efficient, and still fun to drive car, and I’m happy to say the Matrix has turned out to be all of these. I found a ‘one-family owned’, automatic transmission Base model, with over 100K miles. It was well used but well maintained, needed a bit of cleaning, and I got it for a little over $5K (before the obscene California tax and registration fees, sheesh). Since then we’ve already put over 10K miles on it, including a couple of thousand mile roadtrips. I’ve had to put on new front brake pads, a new battery, and a couple of tires, but it has been dead reliable and never missed a beat. It’s been averaging 29/34 mpg, and its actually pretty fun to drive. Its got enough torque to hit the on-ramps, enough horsepower for safe highway passing (as long as you’re not loaded down), good braking characteristics, sharp steering, suprisingly good handling, and good ergonomics. The 5-door hatchback is real handy, drop the rear seats and it will swallow a trip to Home Depot, put the seats back up and it takes 4 six foot adults as well as my 85 lb Labrador in the back bay with no problem. The lack of cruise control gets a bit old, but at least the accelerator pedal has a light spring, and the center console is a little low to be a good arm rest for six footers. But overall, the Matrix hits on cylinders for the job it was intended to do. I’ll give it two thumbs up!
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