Big Bet

Upping The Ante In The High-Stakes Compact CUV Game

- Frank Markus

Let’s face it. If you are going to bet big bucks, the car biz is one of the lousier investments. Tech startups are far glitzier and offer looser slots (at least by price-to-earnings or value-to-sales yardsticks). Take your eye off the car-biz action for a minute, and you could be crapping out $1 billion with a one-generation, over-incentivized mistake.

But some still have the cojones to play the game. The savviest bettors these days are throwing down on compact CUVs, the industry’s largest and fastest growing segment. Chevy has had a seat at the high-roller table with its Equinox, but even after 13 years it’s a perennial fifth-place seller. The cardsharps at Honda, Toyota, and Nissan cash in some hundred-thousand-plus more sales per year. But Chevy’s all-new 2018 Equinox brings a fresh pile of chips to the game. We looked at its initial hand last fall and found it encouraging; now we’ve run the numbers on the mainstream 1.5-liter front-drive offering and are ready to handicap its odds a bit more.

Powertrain We’ve reported on the Equinox’s impressive weight loss (about 400 pounds), much of which was made possible by adopting a lighter four cylinder-turbo-only engine lineup. First to market is a 1.5-liter version,created primarily as a Chinese-market tax darling. Rated at 170 hp, it cedes hp leadership to the 1.5Ts in the best-selling Honda CR-V (190 hp) and fourth-place Ford Escape (179 hp), but the Chevy’s 203 lb-ft of torque trumps these rivals by 24 and 26 lb-ft, respectively. (The second- and third-place Toyota RAV4 and Nissan Rogue make similar power but less torque from 2.4- and 2.5-liter naturally aspirated fours similar to the old Equinox’s base-model mill.)