it's a great vehicle, we bought it used, a 1 year old lease return. the only trouble i've had so far (touch wood) is a bad spark plug coil, replaced under warranty of course.
when i first got it, i changed the oil right away. the records showed the couple services it had since new were just oil changes etc, using dealer bulk dexos1 oil i'm assuming. when i changed the oil, the olm was only at around 30% i believe, but man that oil was rough looking. the filter had thick sludgy oil on it, and i could see some pretty thick stuff under the oil filler cap on the valvetrain... i've read that the sonic, cruze, trax 1.4 turbos called for dexos1 and at the time gm dealers sold and used a semi syn ac delco oil, which they may still use... but these 1.4T's are hard on oil and the semi syn ac delco stuff doesn't stand up at all. a short fill of pennzoil platinum sorted that out. since then i've always used a full syn 5w30, mostly pennzoil platinum or mobil 1, all dexos1 of course.
i'll run the olm down to 20% or under, which is about 8000 - 10,000km for me, once a year.