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" A Camaro without a V8 used to be like cheap sushi without soy sauce. You needed the overpowering flavor of a powerful Corvette engine to choke down the heavy, commodity car chassis. The new Camaro, however, is built off the same architecture as the Cadillac ATS and CTS. Pretty fresh fish. Maybe we can enjoy it with less sodium? There are now two healthy alternatives to the V8. An updated 3.6-liter V6 makes 335 hp. A 2.0-liter, turbo four-cylinder makes 275 hp. Chevy stresses that its four-cylinder is a base model rather than a midrange offering like the Ecoboost Mustang, because it costs $1495 less than the V6 Camaro. But the Camaro costs $1650 more than the &amp;#039;Stang to start with, so it&amp;#039;s a difference without distinction.\u00A0    The V6 is quicker, obviously, but the four-cylinder has little trouble hustling the Camaro&amp;#039;s 3300 pounds. On a straight stretch of desert road where California meets Nevada, with only the distant mountains and cirrus clouds to implicate me, I dump the clutch and head for the horizon, leaving behind two black strips for patrolmen to ponder their next time through.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Yes, officer, the base Camaro gets a limited-slip differential if you order the manual.&amp;quot;\u00A0 Partially because the landscape is so vast, but also because the engine is so quiet, speed comes as a surprise in this car. By the time I lift out of the throttle and ease onto the brakes, the Camaro&amp;#039;s doing 140 mph.  Indeed, noise is the big sacrifice for four-cylinder Camaros. The six-cylinder, paired for the first time with a two-mode sport exhaust, could probably fool your date into thinking you got the big-boy engine. No such luck in the four. At startup and during everyday driving, the four-cylinder&amp;#039;s about as noticeable as the hum of a dryer\u2014pleasant if you&amp;#039;re listening for it but just as easy to ignore altogether. Floor it and you get a medium-pitched thrum accompanied by a faint turbo whistle that becomes less faint if you open the window. It breathes freely and doesn&amp;#039;t suffer from hanging throttle, which often afflicts little turbo engines and makes it hard to match engine revs on downshifts. It also sounds better than the grainy, whiny four-cylinder in the Mustang. But the base Camaro is not a car you buy because you want it to sound like a Camaro.\u00A0 But what you&amp;#039;re really paying for here isn&amp;#039;t the engine. What you&amp;#039;re paying for is all the brilliant stuff the engine is pushing. Everything from the aluminum engine cradle to the steering gear is the same as you&amp;#039;ll find in rear-wheel-drive Cadillacs. Even the smooth manual transmission on the four- and six-cylinder Camaro benefits from this inheritance, as the Cadillac guys splurged on new synchros to improve shift feel in the 2.0-liter ATS.\u00A0    The breeding is obvious from the first corner at Spring Mountain Motorsports Park. Step on the brake pedal, high and firm, then roll your heel to blip the throttle as you snap that shifter down a gear with an easy flick of the wrist. Turn the steering wheel, which feels as crisp as a new dollar bill, and the front end dials into the apex like a heat-seeking missile. This thing might look like a Camaro. It might have the plastic interior and tiny trunk of a Camaro. But it drives like a Cadillac ATS. \u00A0 The base Camaro used to sell to the style conscious on a budget and to rental fleets. No doubt, the four and six-cylinder will satisfy both crowds (although Chevy, as always, hopes to wean itself from the latter). But the not-a-V8 Camaros should also appeal to a third group: track rats. The four-cylinder starts for $26,695\u2014about $10,000 less than the V8. Add $1285 for heavy-duty cooling and four-piston Brembo front brakes, and you&amp;#039;ve got a legitimate rear-wheel-drive sports car for way under $30,000. In other words, good sushi at a cheap sushi price. Save all that soy sauce money for tires and track days. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/first-drives/reviews/a28492/the-four-cylinder-camaro-is-the-27000-cadillac-ats-we-wanted/>