Here’s President Obama in 2010 on the Chevrolet Cruze:

A certain General Motors car has received great praise from President Obama. Ever heard of the Chevy Cruze? Of course you have — GM has been hyping it through the roof. Well, apparently the company’s latest compact car has sold over 100,000 units internationally, leading the president to crown it his ‘Car of the Future’. Whereas the rest of the world has gotten their hands on the Cruze, North American buyers have to wait until later this year sit in one.

And here’s Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio a few days ago:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, says that the auto industry bailouts orchestrated by the Obama administration two years ago helped save thousands of manufacturing jobs in the Buckeye State and likely averted a depression. And, the senator said, new vehicles such as General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet Cruze deserves some of the credit for putting the industry in Ohio back to work.”Our efforts were aimed at far more than saving two of the Big 3,” Browne said. “They were about the livelihoods of independent auto suppliers and thousands of workers in the state.”The senator made his remarks Thursday during a conference call with reporters in advance of President Obama’s visit today to a Chrysler plant in Toledo.

About those “thousands” of jobs saved, here’s John Berleau over on the homepage:

But we need to look under the hood of those employment claims. And in this case, the first place to look is a June 1 Cleveland Plain Dealer story by Robert Schoenberger that seemingly contradicts the president’s figures for auto job growth. Schoenberger reported the sobering fact that even after the Bush and Obama administrations spent $62 billion to bail out Chrysler and General Motors, “the two automakers employ 16,500 fewer people than they did in 2009.”
How can these two statistics — 113,000 new jobs and 16,500 fewer auto workers — simultaneously be true? After all, Obama didn’t say “saved or created” — although there was plenty of that elsewhere in the administration’s talking points of the bailouts’ supposed success — he said “added.” And other administration officials and documents also specifically used the term “added” or “created” with the similar statistic of 115,000 jobs when touting the bailouts.
But the fine print, in Obama’s speech quoted above and the quotes listed below, is the artful use of the term “industry” or “auto industry.”

Yeah. Artful accounting, like AIG and Enron.

But back to actual reviews of the Cruze, via Mickey Kaus.

Automobile magazine ranks the Cruze 5th out of the 6 cars they tested in the class. The Ford Focus was number one. (Click on page 12 of the article for the start of the rankings)

Car and Driver ranks the Cruze 4th out of the 5 cars in their test, again with the Ford Focus number one.