Originally Posted By: RGR
Traded it because the wife wanted to drive a convertible. The car was fine, gave me no trouble, was excellent in the snow, could be semi-thrashed in the canyons and I can personally vouch for the value and effect of the vectoring AWD during hard cornering. Most amazing thing I ever felt, it acted like a front driver, wanted to push, going into corners, and then as soon as you began to feed in throttle it transferred weight to outside rear, line tightened up and it felt like you could throttle steer if you wanted to. Quite cool, and effective. Decent power, the CVT works well for this kind of application. Tight suspension response, 28-29mpg highway, 31-32 road tripping on mostly back roads, 19 mpg around town on short trips, seats comfortable enough for 500 mile days, Nav was pretty [censored], easy to change oil on, no warranty problems at all.
Now, the other day I was sitting at a stop light with the window down, beside someone in a Juke, and it was making the [censored] engine noise, ticking, clacking, loud tapping, whatever it was, I wouldn't want anything to do with buying it used. I'm betting these cars would really like to be kept current on maintenance and oil levels, between the turbo and DI and all the moving parts for the AWD system, there are plenty of things to break.
Having said that, now that the timing chain recalls have been or are being worked through, no one is complaining much about quality issues, the little thing seems pretty solid.
Thanks for the information, I plan to look for a non-turbo model (I think they had one in 2012 or 2013. Teenagers and turbos do not mix well
, but from what I read and from feedback from people like you, it seems to be a good little car as long as it is maintained and not abused.