Six years ago, General Motors decided to efface the name Daewoo from Europe a bankrupt company which it bought in 2001.
But Daewoo cars had a great success in Romania and the story must have been continued somehow.
So, this is how the first Spark was born kind of a more styled Daewoo Matiz which didn't stand out by anything except the low price it had.
Now the Spark saga has arrived at its second act and the relation between this car and the previous was nixed.
Aesthetically, Spark is the most daring and aggressive car from it's class.
Though it's still called Matiz in some few markets, the new Spark has nothing in common with his ancestor.
It's a modern car, well-built and cheap. The curved lines with sharpened edges are blending
very good with the body which has a length of 3,64 m
The cockpit is surprisingly modern, starting with the design to the illumination.
Each detail was made to suggest speed and bitterness, same as the Beat concept from
which Spark has descended. This car you see here is a Spark LT, which
stands for the most expensive and equipped model. So the technology and the comfort are at the
highest level for what Chevrolet can offer on this model.
Doubtless, the powerful point of this Spark is the illumination.
At the first sight, in daylight, the dashboard seems to be a sophisticated Chinese thing,
but this first bad impression disappears immediately as you get in a tunnel.
The interior lights are turquoise with red, reminding of Jaguar XF, XJ - cars with royal blood.
It's true... the Chevrolet's engineers had
chosen a higher brilliancy for the lights and there is no dimmer.
This could generate tiredness when you drive a lot, but let's face it...
This is not a car for long trips, it's a city car. Chevrolet gave to the little Spark endowments
found in higher class cars: music controls on the steering-wheel, electric powered and
heated mirrors, automatic air conditioning, four electric powered windows, parking distance
control, a decent audio system and alloy wheels. Above all of these is the interior space for
passengers which theoretically is for five but it's recommended for four passengers.
There are a lot of storage compartments: five in the center console and three in the dashboard
in addition to the door pockets which have enough space to store 1.5 litre bottles, some
few mobile phones and some wallets. The 1.2 litre gasoline engine is also impressive.
It develops 81 Metric Horsepower. The engine is silent, almost undetectable
when you have the engine turned on without being in a gear.
The 5-speed manual gearbox very good exploits this engine but the reverse gear is like a lottery.
The suspension is doing a great job, especially in the front.
It's very silent and makes you feel like having sponge wheels.
All you can hear coming from the rear suspension is the smooth way it deals shocks.
The silence inside the cockpit unsurprisingly on lump stone and the plastics don't make a sound.
The body seems to have a very good rigidity,
but the stability is not a strong issue of the Spark due to the soft suspension.
The choice of the engineers was very good because Spark is not a racing car, but a city car.
It needs to take many bad urban roads and to turn softly at low speeds.
At a price of about 10,000 euros for a car like this, the Spark is a feared enemy for
the triplets Citroen C1, Peugeot 107, Toyota Aygo and also for Hyundai i10.
Looking at the rivals, Chevrolet Spark doesn't have a real minus.
The dashboard with cheap appearance and the gearbox with inaccurate reverse are very small
disadvantages in comparison with all the qualities mentioned before.