Another in a series of my reviews that appeared in the online version of African Americans On Wheels, a now defunct automotive magazine that was included as an insert in the Sunday newspapers of major cities.
I know the Leganza has some fans here, but I’m not one of them. My wife and I did give this car a good workout, driving it to Freehold, NJ, to visit some of my relatives. Driving home, one of the warning lights on the dash flickered on and off, which is the only time I ever experienced an issue that might be serious in a press car. I can’t remember which light it was, but I let the company that handles press cars know what happened.
I still stand by what I say below – that you have to bring your A-game to play in the mid-size sedan wars, especially if you’re an unknown. The Leganza wasn’t it, and Daewoo was gone from these shores shortly thereafter (although their cars showed up again six years later badged as Suzukis).
The mid-size market is tough, and even many established brands have barely been able to make a dent in the sales of market leaders Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. So what makes South Korea’s Daewoo think that it has a chance with its Leganza CDX sedan?
From a stylistic standpoint, the Leganza is impressive. Designed by ItalDesign of Italy, it features a smooth, teardrop shape with ovoid headlamps, slightly rounded rear windows, and a gracefully sloping trunk. The style continues on the inside, with thick leather seats and imitation wood trim. The dashboard even has a funky shape. Unlike the anonymous subcompact Lanos, this car turned some heads.
As nice as the interior is, I found it difficult to get comfortable. The four-way power driver’s seat is high – a little too high – and does not adjust for height. The stereo system sounds good, but the light show from the equalizer is gimmicky and unnecessary. Furthermore, the trunk-mounted six-CD changer is mounted in the center under the rear shelf, essentially blocking bulky cargo that may otherwise fit. Another luxury touch of the Leganza is climate control, but it seemed to blow ice cold air even into the upper ranges, where it switched to desert hot. The rear window defogger is useless. Cruise control is optional, and conspicuously missing from our loaded test car.
The 2.2 liter four-cylinder engine, the Leganza’s sole powerplant, is its Achilles’ heel. With the pedal to the metal, the engine seems to make more noise than power and sounds downright harsh at the limit. The base engines in the Camry and Accord, although similar in size, feel much smoother and more powerful. It rides well, but handling is sloppy.
If this review seems harsher than usual, it is. That’s because the majority of buyers in this segment are more concerned with substance over style, as has been demonstrated with the consistently slow sales of stylish mid-size cars, such as the Hyundai Sonata, that cost thousands less than the utterly bland Camry and Accord. For $20,000, I see few people taking a fully-loaded Leganza over more sparsely equipped versions of its fore-mentioned competition.
For more information contact 1-800-966-1775
SPECIFICATIONS
Type:4-Door Sedan
Engine:131-horsepower, 2.2 liter inline 4
Transmission:4-Speed Automatic
EPA Mileage:N/A
Tested Price:$20,000 (est.)
Feel free to call the number above if you’re interested in extending your car’s warranty. Or you can just wait for them to call you. You know they will.
I always thought these Daewoo brand sold rebadged/restyled Opels. In this case Opel Vectra. But Wikipedia doesn’t say much here. Only that it is a GM product. Then again I remember a relative of my girlfriend who had such a car (not this one, she had another Daewoo) but I’m absolutely sure it was an old Opel Corsa under the hood.
That’s how they got their start – primarily with the Kadette E. This, along with the Lanos and Nubira, were their first (and only, as an independent company) attempt at unique designs.
At least you knew the dashboard lightbulb worked 🙂
I wasn’t a fan of any of the Daewoo lineup when new but they’ve sort of earned my grudging respect after seeing multiples at the junkyards. They tend to rack up decent mileages, while not generally exceeding 200k they sometimes get close and usually look like they’ve lived fairly hard lives with possibly questionable maintenance practices/intervals although the interiors tend to hold up pretty well. Sold on a budget and often heavily discounted they were often maintained the same way.
Adam already linked to it at the top of his post, but I was a somewhat surprised that the $500 Leganza my younger son bought as his first car was better than I might have expected, given what the common perception of Daewoos was, especially after they had left the market. It’s not uncommon to have them lumped in with Yugo, the very early Hyundais, and such.
The Leganza was a fairly ambitious car, and its solidity (as a cheap beater) surprised me. It certainly wasn’t a Honda Accord, but I’d put it up against some of the more modest Detroit sedans at the time. In any case, its interior was better quality than expected, and it still ran perfectly and its handling was secure if not inspiring.
I agree – as a $500 beater, it’s perfect. New? I would rank it below the contemporary Sonata in quality and driveability, but pretty much on par with a 4-cylinder Malibu, Stratus/Breeze & Contour/Mystique. However, your average Camry/Accord buyer wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole, and most of your domestic buyers were just that – domestic buyers. That left very few buyers, and that’s what they got.
If Daewoo had offered Camry/Accord quality, refinement and driveability at a Sonata price, then they would have had a fighting chance. Unfortunately, they provided unknown quality with sub-Sonata refinement and driveability at a Sonata price, and those people just bought Sonatas.
I can remember seeing a decent number of Daewoos (Daewooe?) on the road at one point, and then they all seemed to vanish at once. It was the Nubira that bothered me the most. I mean, you can’t just go 2/3 of the way to spelling the word Nubile then do a hard detour in the last couple of letters.
I have less-than-fond memories of the Nubira as well. Only rented one for a couple of days, but that was more than enough time to be thoroughly disappointed. Harsh riding, poor handling, noisy. One of the least-appealing cars I’ve ever driven.
I always thought that Daewoo Nubira sounded like a tropical disease that is best avoided.
I always thought it sounded like a body part where that disease might fester.
I find it so interesting how the Korean automakers always seemed to design their full-size sedans with a bent toward comfort luxury. The Leganza, the Amanti, the XG 350/Grandeur/Azera, the Cadenza…they’re all clearly aspirational products, and straight up optimized for the KDM market.
They also make for great depreciated boulevard cruisers. The current Cadenza, which arrived for 2017–and which looks from the outside like a *better-styled* S90, can be had in the low $20K range, with low mileage.
Great review; you nailed it within the required 750 words, and you identified the key problem with this car – it competed with the Accord and Camry, and it wasn’t in their ballpark, or even their league.
Thanks Alan! I wish I had 750 words to work with. My limit was 350, though this review pushed it by 5.
Considering which, the reviews are first-rate. They must have appeared in print as no much more than a large-scale caption beneath the photo.
These were online only. They were limited to 350 words because the managing editor was convinced that people didn’t want to read anything longer on a screen.
There is something to that logic in some cases, I find my attention span sometimes wandering a bit with longer pieces. Thankfully Paul limits my reviews to 50,000 words, otherwise I might go on a little more… 🙂
In 1998, I made my first trip to Denver involving the nearly new Denver International. And, I had my first and only experience with the new enough to me Daewoo brand.
In all honesty, I can’t recall if my default rental was a Nubira or a Laganza, the car in the subject photo looks like how I recall all Daewoos, so I’ll make the call on Laganza. Utterly forgettable. Another Asian U.S. start up brand during the ’80s and ’90s. It seemed like one would come along every few years. Outside of Hyundai / Kia, most are long forgotten. When told what I was getting, I expected it to come across a bit cheap and cheesy. And, I just don’t recall!
I really enjoyed my trip, I did a lot of driving, to Fort Collins, then on to Utah via I-70. I was looking forward to the trip and it did not disappoint. The weather for February was spectacular, and the scenery even more spectacular – almost any car that provided its basic functions without issue would have been forgettable.
But, I will admit that given my tastes, something like a new Chrysler LHS would have been icing on the cake on that trip.
Got to love my Daewoo Super Salon Brougham.
Is that a HONDA window sticker in the “C” pillar??
The original review seems spot-on.
After reading all of these reprints form the ’90s I was sorta expecting the toll-free number to spell 800-4-DAEWOO.
I had a coworker who owned a Daewoo Nubira new. It was one of the last Daewoo-branded cars sold in the US, an ’01 or ’02 model, and she had so many problems on it she rolled the debt onto her next, ahead-of-schedule new car, an ’04 or ’05 Corolla. When I last bumped into her about 3 years ago, she was still driving that rock solid and long-since-paid-off Toyota.
I have to agree with a couple of comments above that the old Daewoos generally proved pretty resilient, especially so given that they started life as market price-leaders – not usually the repository of careful and maintenance-conscious buyers.
They were not-awful cars, and improving upwards (witness the Nubira, a really-quite-ok device) until the Asian financial crisis, when our good friends at GM bought the company.
Now, it’s entirely possible that things might have gone downhill to nothing at all without the big American, but rest assured, we received many a Daewoo-made GM car here (including cars well-liked on this site, like the Cruze) whose quality was just awful, improving only downwards. GM Korea might just be yet another of GM’s sins of deadliness. If you were unfortunate enough to buy one of their products, badged as a Holden, you’d probably agree.
These Leganzas intrigued a bit back in the day, because they looked interesting, if not actually pretty, like a minor Jag or somesuch, but Adam’s review chimes with my memory of the type they got locally – something to buy only for the price.
A few key points, from a U.S. perspective. The first Daewoo sold here, the Pontiac LeMans (based on the Opel Kadette E) was so bad that Consumer Reports’ summary just said, “Avoid this car.” The 3 Daewoo badged cars – Leganza, Nubira & Lanos – were not paragons of quality, either. I recall that one of the reasons that GM just purchased the assets of the bankrupt company rather than save the company from bankruptcy is that they did not want to be responsible for the extensive warranty claims. Finally, when later versions of the cars reappeared as the Suzuki Verona, Forenza & Reno, Suzuki’s warranty expenses skyrocketed, and may have contributed to Suzuki auto ultimately pulling out of the U.S.
We got the LeMans as a Daewoo and it was rated crapulous (though not down to the avoid it category), and the newer jobs mentioned weren’t great, but they were looking towards up (and as mentioned, turned out to be survivors). On from there, under GM, the cars were (largely) sold as GM Holden badges of various types, none very good, and all certainly not a rise from the Daewoo days.
But into more modern times, the Cruze and AWD Captiva and Barina (Aveo) were perfectly ok-ish US and Opel designs, but stuck together with cheese and spit and electrified by candlepower and painted with duck doings. By which I mean that the quality was iffy at best. Apparently, the major plant GM had acquired was the oldest in S.E. Asia. It showed. And that they sold all this under the GM umbrella here (and who knows where else) doesn’t reflect too well on their management attitude. Sounds a bit sinful to be so cavalier to me. Say, cavalier, sounds like a good car name…
Incidentally, Suzuki avoided all this soiling here by not selling any of this dross as theirs, and is thus still rightly regarded as a very decent small car to buy.
Daewoos probably were ok cars, but they also have/share the honor of destroying the latest/final attempt to market Chevrolet (as mass market car) in Europe. Probably also the generalplan EU for the GM in general… The Cunning Plan was to imitate VW group, by taking Opel upmarket a’la VW. With ads touting the german origin and qualities of the Opel. Das Auto! And Chevy would become the Skoda. Add in probable Cadillac revival, I guess Saab was still part of the plan. Now, the execution:
Opel Is Opel, solid cars, not very exciting, some GM parts bin in the mix to cheapen the edges up. Solid effort, but so is Ford, Skoda etc. So why would you suddenly decide to pay more? Because there are german celebrities in TV spots run in non german speaking markets? Claudia Schiffer I can understand, but some pretentious german football dude who I cannot recognize?
Chevy: rebadge Daewoos as Chevrolets, change the grille and emblems, keep most of the model names… Chevrolet Matiz, Nubira… Skoda must be trembling in fear. Eventually Cruze and redesigned Aveo (Sonic) were introduced, US Impala imported, so there was finally some proof for the american image. Solid cars that would compete mainly by lower pricing, especially with their platform siblings. Within the same showrooms…
The rest is history, as they say.
That’s just comically awful. Can’t possibly imagine why it didn’t pan out. Still, it did give Top Gear the Chev Lacetti.
The latter which, btw, was sold here as – wait for the genius of it – a Holden Viva. Yes, a poorly-built uncompetitive car named after a much-disliked 1960’s Vauxhall rust-bucket. Who’d even consider a Corolla with such appeal as that?
Can’t imagine why Holden no longer exists.
The girlfriend of a buddy bought a Daewoo just before the company folded in North America. Fortunately, the dealer was kind enough to call her periodically to bring it in for service. As explained to me, some warranty money was set aside as part of the bankruptcy. Eventually, the money ran out and no more calls. She was on her own.