Totally legit product reviews: 2012 Chevrolet Impala

This is part of a new category of blog posts in which I give fair and balanced reviews of products that I have used, in the hope that these reviews may be helpful to others. Please note that they will be entirely fair and balanced, and not at all blown out of proportion.*

These reviews will be every bit as legit as the review I wrote for my iPhone 4S when I first took possession of it this summer.

*they will be so completely blown out of proportion you don't even know.

2012 Chevrolet Impala

On Friday evening, on my way home from work, some youngster wasn't paying attention and rear-ended my beautiful shiny 2014 Subaru Forester so hard that I crashed into the car in front of me. I didn't have the baby with me, and I wasn't hurt, but my poor car paid a high price for protecting me. The rear bumper was completely destroyed, so I immediately called Enterprise to get a rental car.

The car they gave me was a 2012 Chevrolet Impala. And I can look you straight in the face and, without blinking, tell you that this Impala is the biggest piece of crap car I have ever had the misfortune of driving.

This is not a case of brattiness. In high school, I was the proud owner of a 1998 Ford Escort -- king of the pieces of crap. But I loved that car. And if someone offered to trade me this 2012 Chevy Impala for that 1998 Ford Escort, I would take the Escort in a second. Before I bought the Forester, I drove a Honda Civic VP that wasn't worth a penny over $13K when it was brand new. In fact, I just looked up the price of the Impala compared to the price of my Forester, and this abysmal pile of trash is actually a full $3K more expensive than my Subaru.

So, I repeat -- this is not brattiness talking. The Impala is expensive AND it also sucks.

What sucks about it? Oh boy, where do I begin!!! First off, it drives like a truck. I just had to put gas in it and I actually spent some time wondering if it needed diesel fuel or regular unleaded gasoline. I would not have been surprised in the least to discover that it ran on diesel.

The engine rumbles loudly and the car will not budge unless your foot is on the accelerator. This makes backing out of parking spots really fun, as instead of riding the brake while you inch out until you can actually see whether there are any cars coming, you get to hit the gas and just pray that the coast is clear. I love living so dangerously!!!

It's an automatic, but the transmission is of such poor quality that it shifts worse than a manual transmission being driven by a 15-year-old girl who is "just learning."

The turning radius is an embarrassment. I had it parked on the street at our house and when I tried to turn it around, I had to do a five-point turn, because a three-point turn was only sufficient to point the car's nose at my neighbor's living room. Also, for whatever reason, the gear shifter doesn't have any labels on it, so as you repeatedly switch from R to D to R to D, you have to look at the digital display on the dashboard to make sure you're in the right gear. I don't know why this pisses me off so much, but it does.

The car is ridiculously heavy, which is probably the main reason why it won't move unless you're hitting the gas. It's like a cinder block on wheels. No, wait -- it's like a cinder block that someone somehow melted and then flattened out, so it still weighs the same but has a snout like Barbra Streisand and an ass like Kim Kardashian. I went to the grocery store and when I got home, the toilet paper I had bought was so deep in the trunk that I had to physically enter the trunk in order to reach it.

The lights are permanently set to "auto", but they don't turn off when you turn off the car. I mean I guess they would eventually turn off, but I'm not about to walk away with the lights still on and just cross my fingers that they'll turn off in a minute or two. So instead, I get to turn off the car, get out, see that the lights are still on (since there's no indication from inside the car that the lights are still on -- no beeping, no lit-up dashboard, etc), and then get back in and manually turn the lights off. I get to do this roughly 100% of the times that I drive the car anywhere. I suppose I will eventually learn to turn the lights off manually every time I turn off the car, but this is still an incredibly stupid design feature.

The upholstery is this furry felty shit that I don't want to ever touch me.

And the smell -- my god, the smell!!! I'm sure that this is particular to MY Chevy Impala and all Chevy Impalas don't have this same odor to them, but at the same time, it's kind of fun to pretend that some dickhead white collar at Chevrolet in Detroit was like "hey, what if -- and just hang with me for a second here -- what if we made all the Impalas smell like a wet dog had shed all its fur and then died in the engine block??" And this whole committee was like "hell yeah that's a kickass idea!" because they all live in Detroit, which is basically the infected ingrown toenail of America, so they have no idea that normal people don't like to smell things that f**king stink.

I bought an air freshener to make the car driveable at least, but it did not help. Now it smells like your high school boyfriend's car, which had all his gym clothes in it and a bunch of fast food trash stuffed under the passenger seat and some cigarette butts from when his buddy smoked in there and tufts of fur from when he picked the dog up from the vet but oh don't worry, he's got a bloody air freshener in there to mingle New Car Scent with all the assorted stank that comes with being a 16-year-old boy.

This is what my f**king Impala smells like.

If you ever find yourself at a rental car company and they want to give you an Impala, please do us all a favor: buy the extra insurance they always offer you, and then fill the back seat with gasoline, put a rock on the accelerator, and let the car drive itself off a cliff. Neither the rental car company nor the insurance company will investigate the crash, I promise. They'll just give you a knowing smile and say "wow, that's so weird how that happened!" and you'll smile back and say "I know, weird, right?" Because even though everyone knows what you did, they'll be happy that you made the world a better place by ridding it of one additional 2012 Chevy Impala.