Should you buy a used Chevrolet Equinox? Probably not.

By Jason Allan, former head of vehicle reviews and ratings at Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader

The Chevrolet Equinox is a comfortable compact SUV that does nothing as well as the ones Bestest lists. The ride is smooth, the rear seat has as much legroom as the class leaders, and the MyLink touchscreen is quick and simple, with wireless CarPlay standard. A clean one-owner Equinox is a pleasant, easy commuter.

Car and Driver, Kelley Blue Book, the resale data and reliability all put the Chevrolet Equinox near the bottom of the group. Bestest measures reliability by repair bills, what insurers expect to pay to fix a used car bought with about 30,000 miles, and the Equinox's run about twice the lowest in the class. The other reasons are plain from the driver's seat: the 1.5-liter turbo is out of breath on a freeway merge and the six-speed is slow to downshift, the cabin is a 2018 design in hard plastic, and the cargo hold is smaller than most rivals'. The low used price is the deceiving part. A used Equinox lists for less than the compact SUVs Bestest lists, but Orange County lots are full of the cheapest trims with the most miles, so part of the gap is the car you'd be getting, and the rest vanishes at trade-in because the Equinox depreciates faster. Most two- and three-year-old Equinoxes on those lots have the profile of a fleet car: about six in ten carry more than 40,000 miles.

So the Chevrolet Equinox isn't a Bestest car. You save less than the window sticker suggests on a crossover the class leaders beat in almost every way you'd notice on a test drive. You might have a trouble-free ownership experience, but you won't know what you're missing. If you want an Equinox anyway, here's how I'd shop for one.