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 dependable, comfortable compact SUV that does nothing else as well as the ones Bestest lists. The dependability is real: Consumer Reports' reliability prediction for the 2023 and 2024 cars is tied for second among the 13 compact SUVs Bestest scores. 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 will run for years without drama.

Car and Driver, Kelley Blue Book and the resale data all put the Chevrolet Equinox near the bottom of the group, and the 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.