On any given day, the Chevrolet Equinox is as far out of my imagination as the likelihood that I will ever be completely free of debt. But today, the upcoming refreshed 2021 Chevrolet Equinox has leaked online in China, and it’s pretty terrible.
Here is what the Equinox currently looks like:
This is, on the whole, fine. I don’t know why anyone would buy unless you got some sort of family discount through the dealership, as there are much better looking and better performing crossovers on the market that also come in red, and many other colours. But there it is.
I don’t love the strange layered split grille that’s on a lot of Chevy’s cars, and I don’t love that the profile makes it seem like Chevy’s designers took a sedan’s design, raised it, and then boxed in some glass over where the trunk should be. It’s a very strange, very dated looking thing.
Keep in mind we’re talking about a car GM had to completely scrap because it started out so ugly. The only thing that was ever any interesting about this model was that it was available with a diesel. At least until that was scrapped too.
Here’s the 2021 Chevrolet Equinox, which reportedly leaked through Chinese media this week, though I couldn’t quite trace anything back to a single source.
2021 Chevrolet Equinox spied completely undisguised in China ahead of its unveiling in the coming weeks. The crossover borrows many of its styling cues from the Blazer and it will obtain the company’s new nine-speed automatic transmission. #Chevrolet #Equinox #GM pic.twitter.com/uRENoPJwwz
— Cole Marzen (@cole_marzen) January 15, 2020
What has Chevy done here? As a whole, obviously not too much.
But there’s now a chrome spear shooting through both headlights, extending from a tweaked but still split stacked grille. The lower front bumper has also been squared off a little more, and the taillights have gone from a horrible bulbous reinterpretation of the Camaro taillight design to something tragically much more generic.
In short, these changes don’t fix anything bad about the current Equinox design. The changes only complicate many of the elements that were, for the most part, already fine. They didn’t even attempt at fixing the horrible roofline and greenhouse hanging over the rear end.
But oh well. I will now go back to distancing myself from the Chevy Equinox, for the mystery of what compels people to drop a lot of money on vehicles like this (boring, “I’m just doing here to do a job” crossovers that are good enough) when there are better options out there. I hope you can share that peace with me.
In the meantime, hopefully GM soon realises it just needs to give up on its current direction for the Equinox’s styling. I wonder if what they scrapped was ever any better than this.