Day 2

2011 Chevrolet Camaro SS Convertible
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Hey weather man, continue to be wrong! The skies so far have parted every evening on my way home, allowing for some top down motoring during a week that I didn’t expect to drop the top even once.

So… has the interior of the Camaro convertible been upgraded over the standard coupe? The short answer — no, no it has not. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say it is worse, but only because there were obvious compromises required to make the Camaro a droptop. The interior bits that are not compromised because of the open motoring experience remain untouched, from what I can tell.

The biggest visible change to the interior is the sun visors, which are now paper thin, do not rotate and are about three inches in width. On a positive note, they do have vanity mirrors. The rest seems basically the same: the plastic door panel inserts in bright orange stand out, but for $50,000 they do not stand out in a good way. I’m warming to the gauge cluster that GM is soon going to be using in the new Chevrolet Malibu, but the steering wheel is still plain awful, but rumour has it GM is updating this soon.

2011 Chevrolet Camaro SS Convertible
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Driver comfort does not seem much different. Rear and front passengers seem to have the same appointments as in the coupe, but the trunk, which was small in the coupe is further compromised in this version. Skip carting the tonneau cover with you and you will save some space, but like many hardtop convertibles, the softtop takes room in the already very small trunk. It’s not as a bad as in the defunct Pontiac Solstice, but for a car of this size, it is disappointing to say the least.

After a night of rain, you may experience some odd noises, as the water channels seems to fill up and store water in the fenders or something. At every stop, I was treated to the sound of water sloshing around until it all drained. It had me worried that fuel was getting dumped out of the gas tank as the needle on that gauge seems to be dropping pretty quickly.

With the top down, visibility is great and as others already mentioned in the forums, dropping the top on the Camaro solves the coupe’s rear visibility issue. With the top up though, good luck: I had to back out of a busy parking lot today and really should have spent the 20 seconds to lower the roof. Unfortunately, I feel I’m being hard on the car, yet I like it. Maybe I can make it up to it tomorrow!

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