Which One Would You Rather Drive In The Snow? 2007 Dodge Caliber vs 2008 Chevy Equinox

With winter fast approaching, there are a few adjustments us car folks have to make. And those adjustments are more or less involved depending on where you live. Are you in Los Angeles? Grab a new set of wiper blades to replace the ones that have dried out and cracked from disuse, and you’re good to go. But in snowier places, winter preparedness means something more, maybe up to and including purchasing another vehicle. Yep, this week, we’re looking for the perfect winter beater.

Last week we looked at project cars with varying degrees of need, and it seems like most of you aren’t feeling up to any serious wrenching sessions this year. The Cadillac Eldorado, which needed very little, took an easy win. The half-refreshed Ford Probe and the serious project Lincoln split another fifty percent of the vote, and the cheap Jeep came in dead last, to my surprise.

As much as I admire the land yachts, I think I’d get tired of them. The novelty would wear off quickly, and I’d be left with a big, thirsty car that I don’t feel like driving. The Jeep would be a lot more fun if I still lived somewhere with better places to drive a Jeep. Anywhere fun off-road around here would take hours of Interstate to get to, in a noisy, slow vehicle. No thanks. So that leaves the Probe, and I’d be very happy with that indeed.

Judging by the condition of cars I see in the grocery store parking lot, most folks around here just drive the same car year-round. The number of rust-eaten ten and fifteen year old cars is astonishing, especially to someone who just spent twenty years on the west coast. And I get it; to most people, cars are just consumable appliances. They rust out after a while, and you have to replace them. But what if you have a car you really don’t want to drive in the snow? Maybe it’s too rare to let it get rusty, or just no good in slippery conditions.

Enter the winter beater. Drop a couple grand on something, slap bare-minumum insurance on it, and use it as a sacrificial lamb when there’s snow on the road. As long as it’s got a healthy battery and strong heat, you’re good to go. (Oh, and decent tires help, but I muddled through a few Minnesota winters with some awfully bald tires on various heaps.) So this week, that’s what we’re looking at: two grand or less, good-running, and reasonably good in the snow. Here’s our first two contenders.

2007 Dodge Caliber SE – $1,700

Engine/drivetrain: 1.8-liter DOHC inline-4, five-speed manual, FWD

Location: West Chicago, IL

Odometer reading: 150,000 miles

Operational status: Runs and drives well

Of all the boneheaded moves made by Chrysler during the Daimler years – and there were many – the worst to me was replacing the cheap and cheerful Neon with this awkward, lumbering thing. The Dodge Caliber could be considered a more practical vehicle than the Neon, owing to its hatchback body design, but it’s a step backward in almost every other way. Its best feature these days, as a used car, is its low price. And I guess they’ve turned out to be not wholly unreliable ways to get around, either. And maybe if you have never driven a Neon, you won’t know what you missed.

This is the basic SE model, which is confusing to those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and remember SE standing for “Special Edition,” or the fancy model. But no, here, SE is the plain vanilla version. As such, it has a 1.8 liter Chrysler-Mitsubishi-Hyundai “World” engine, paired with a five-speed manual transmission. There’s some debate about whether a manual or an automatic is better in the snow; some people like the finer control of a clutch, while others think it’s better to just let the torque converter do the work for you. I’ve driven both, extensively, and I can’t say I have a preference. Driving in snow sucks no matter what. Since the available automatic in the Caliber was a CVT, I think it’s definitely a plus that this one has a stick. It also has a brand-new battery and “practically new” tires.

DaimlerChrysler was cutting costs to the bone during this period, and it shows in the interiors of its cars most of all. There’s a lot of hard plastic and industrial-feeling fabric in here. The good news is that that stuff is all hard-wearing, and it’s holding up well. Since it’s a base model, there’s no power windows or locks to fail, either. It does have air conditioning, and it works, so the defroster should be nice and strong. But is it too much to ask to clean it out and vacuum it before taking a picture?

To the surprise of no one, it’s pretty rusty outside. I’ve seen worse, but road salt has definitely had its way with this car. But I can’t imagine it’s structurally compromised, or the seller wouldn’t have bothered replacing the tires and the battery. You can probably get a year or two out of it, which, for this price, seems more than fair.

2008 Chevrolet Equinox LT – $1,950

Engine/drivetrain: 3.4-liter OHV V6, five-speed automatic, AWD

Location: Garden City, MI

Odometer reading: 184,000 miles

Operational status: Runs and drives well

In 2005, Chevrolet replaced the ancient, truck-based S-10 Blazer with this car-based crossover, meaning that this car has something in common with the Dodge Caliber: it doesn’t fill the shoes of its predecessor. Sure, the old Blazer was inefficient, and it rode like an ox cart, but it was built like a tank, and it had personality. This is just a Malibu on stilts. It has zero charisma, and since this one is missing the Chevy badge on the front, it could be a generic car in an architectural rendering or an NPC car in a video game. But it’s cheap, and it has all-wheel-drive, and you’re not trying to impress anybody with a winter car anyway.

I actually had to look up the powertrain in this one, because I had no idea what was under the hood of these. It’s a typical 3.4-liter pushrod V6, but with one major difference: this one was built in China. I didn’t know GM was importing engines from China twenty years ago. Learn something new every day, I guess. Its transmission isn’t the 4T60/4T65 you might expect, either. Instead, it’s a five-speed Aisin unit made in Japan. And the whole car was put together in Canada. This thing’s from everywhere. It runs and drives well, but the ABS warning light is on, and the seller hasn’t tried to figure out why. They don’t mention it, but the airbag warning light is on, too. That one you should probably get checked out.

This is the mid-level LT model, so it has all the power stuff most people want, along with leather seats. The seats are not in great shape; there are cuts in the seat base on the driver’s side, and some seams popping as well. The passenger’s seat isn’t a whole lot better. The air conditioning works in this one, too. The seller says it has a “premium sound system,” but the photo of it shows one of those cheap eBay single-DIN stereos. Hardly premium, but it’s better than nothing, I guess.

This one looks better outside, but I don’t know if that just means it’s better at hiding its rust. I think I see some bubbles in the rear wheel arches, and I think that’s plastic cladding on the rocker panels, so it’s probably best to crawl under it and take a look. The missing grille trim strip looks kind of bad, but if it bothers you, you can probably find one in almost any junkyard.

I’m setting $2,000 as the price cap for this week, because it’s the most I’d be willing to spend on a beater for the winter. Expect rust, high miles, and broken stuff, but I can promise you that I’ll only look at cars that the sellers claim are good runners. And I’ll try to get some variety in here, as much as I can, anyway. What do you think of these first two choices?