Vibe vs. Matrix

[a793aa]

Hello, am new to this board but am the owner of a new 2005 Toyota Matrix and my wife loved it so much that she purchased a 2004 Pontiac Vibe 'used' during the GM employee sales during July. Great Deal! as the trade-ins where everywhere and no room for the dealers to keep them. $13,200 for 2004 Vibe with 16K miles with Moon and Tune package and alum wheels. Anyways, I'll be copy/pasting a comparison rated by ourselves as to the two cars shortly, as the other forum I frequently use is down now. We love both cars and have developed our pro's and con's for each auto. Mine is faster... and so on. No bias here actually, as I'm getting away from an 17 MPG SUV and her a larger car, so where extremely happy with this parctical little cars that behave like mini-SUV's and get great mileage.

[northvibe]

Hey, welcome and congrats on both cars!!I think the big diff. is the vibe has a roof rack, then theres the body and fog lights are on the vibe even on the base i think but not the toyota (atleast for the older ones). Let us know what you think of each and post some pics if you got them!

[ragingfish]

Quote, originally posted by a793aa »Mine is faster... I'm guessing then you have an XRS and she has a base model, because if you had a base/XR, then it's impossible yours is faster (from the factory at least).

[tangerine]

heh beat me to it.

[ragingfish]

Quote, originally posted by joatmon »maybe if his is 5 speed and hers is auto, you can wind up the manual to stay in the power band while the auto probably shifts at lower rpms, except maybe if you floor it.Perhaps. But then, if you wanna be technical, his is "quicker" not faster.

[AKLGT]

doesn't the vibe weigh more however? so wouldn't that also affect speed or quickness on the same engine?

[gargoyle]

Congrats on both cars! Looking forward to your evaluations of both... and yeah, we like pics!

[GMJAP]

Quote, originally posted by trdvibe »doesn't the vibe weigh more however? so wouldn't that also affect speed or quickness on the same engine?It would, but according to Edmund's they weigh the same:2005 Matrix 5spd XR = 2701 lbs2005 Vibe Base FWD 5spd = 2700 lbs(auto adds about 77 pounds on a Matrix; they didn't have the Vibe base FWD auto weight).

[POLO]

Congrat of both of you.

[hippyvibe]

According to Toyota and Pontiac.com the Matrix weighs 2800lbs and the Vibe weighs 2780lbs... Why do so many think the Vibe is the heaviest?!Edit: Also, I hate to break it to ya, but Employee Pricing only applied to new models so whether or not you bought it during the GMS event is really irrelevant.

[GMJAP]

Okay, that was really wierd. There was a post by joatmon in here that I was replying to, and when I tried to post the reply, it said "invalid post". Now, joatmon's post seems to have disappeared.In any case he brought something I'd never thought of before: changing your wheel size affects speedometer reading, and would also affect the ODO. Going from 16" to 17" wheels, you could be going 78 when your ODO says only 75 mph, and your ODO might show only 96% of the actual miles you've traveled (say 96,000mi when you've really gone 100,000.)This could even cause you to think you're getting less than 29 MPG when really you're getting 30MPG.Got these numbers from this website:http://www.web-cars.com/math/tiresize.html

[4X4CHICHI]

Wheel size doesn't matter, tire diameter matters

[tangerine]

you can change wheel size and if you keep the tire size the same you'll get same mph, but if tire size changes your speedo needs recalibrated.

[joatmon]

I deleted it because I didn''t want to hijack this thread into discussions about how one car could be faster than it's identical twin. Didn't think anyone saw it.There are some links in one of the stickies in the wheels/tires forum to some on line tire size calculators. You enter the size of the stock tires, and the size of the tires you are thinking about getting, and it will tell you what effect it will have on the speedometer.If I could figure out how to calibrate the speedometer, I might consider bigger tires. Would take away torque, but would mean lower rpms for the same speed, as a potential mpg boost method, but i need the speedo to be accurate to keep from getting tickets. I think the heavy police presence on my daily commute has a positive effect on my gas mileage.anyway, it gives us something to talk about until a793aa comes back and tells us about his comparison between matrix and vibe. If the trix and the vibe were both base models, they should have the same speed limiter, but if the matrix had oversize tires, then when it's speed limiter kicked in, it would actually be going faster than the vibe with stock tire sizes, even though the speedometers on each would show the same speed. Therefore, the matrix could be "faster" thanthe vibe without having to be an XRS. Same principle would apply if the Vibe had correct tire pressure but the matrix tires were overinflated. But I raised the point only because of Mike's comment about the difference between quicker and faster

[joatmon]

Quote, originally posted by hippyvibe »Edit: Also, I hate to break it to ya, but Employee Pricing only applied to new models so whether or not you bought it during the GMS event is really irrelevant.I think he was saying that since so many people were taking advantage of the employee discounts, the dealers had an overstock of used vehicles that they got as trade ins, so he was able to get a good deal on a used vibe. I don't think he claimed to have gotten the employee discount on a used vehicle.

[ArcsVibe]

Welcome to the family! You've made 2 great purchases there

[tangerine]

any compare news yet?