I currently have a 2011 Chevy HHR that I bought used. It has been a good car and has run well, for the most part. It gets good gas mileage and doesn’t eat oil. It is roomy and comfortable for long rides. I have put the back seat and moved anything from entire rooms worth of boxes to large bulky items with relative ease. My main problem with the car has basically been sub-par parts. So far, I’ve had 3 interior door handles break. They are made out of pretty flimsy plastic. Then there is the fact that the drain tube tends to get slimed up and backs up. I don’t know if it is specifically an HHR issue, but it seemed pretty common. I created huge puddles in the passenger side and blew out my A/C fan motor. All of those things are relatively easy to replace, so they have not been huge problems, but it is annoying. The LED face on the dash has also gone partially out. I’m not sure what caused that; it may have been the water back up, but it has been slowly coming back on. One of the first things that irritated me though was the paint on the bumper. It’s possible that the car was in a wreck before. I wasn’t told and honestly didn’t check like I should have, but a few months after I bought it, I was driving in the rain pretty early in the morning. A large black dog ran out into the road and I hit it. It was raining pretty hard, and I wasn’t going fast. It ran off into the woods, so I kept on going. When I got to my mother in law’s to pick her up, I checked the bumper, and there was a big blue mark on it. I thought it was really weird and tried to rub it off, but the paint around it came off too, so I guess that was the primer. I thought it was strange that that event should cause the paint to come off like that.

The HHR is a stylish retro wagonette based on the Chevrolet Cobalt platform. Introduced in 2006, it offers more interior space and better looks than the Cobalt, although the roughly $3000 premium for the HHR is not insubstantial. An economy-minded ride, the regular HHR offers a choice of 2.2- And 2.4-Liter four-cylinder engines, with 155 hp and 172 hp, respectively. Transmission choices are a five-speed manual and a four-speed automatic.